Getting Rid of the Gorilla Except

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

In just a few weeks Getting Rid of the Gorilla will hit bookstores. It's been my prayer that this book will help a lot of people who have been banged up by life. Here's an excerpt from pages 142-143:

The Journal of John Woolman recounts a scene when Woolman, a Quaker who lived in colonial times in what is now New Jersey, tried to conduct a prayer meeting with a Native American tribe along the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

Woolman wrote, “On the evening of the 18th I was at their meeting, where pure gospel love was felt, to the tendering of some of our hearts. The interpreters endeavoured to acquaint the people of what I said in short sentences, but found some difficulty, as none of them were quite perfect in the English and Delaware tongues.”

Eventually Woolman decided to stop the interpreting and trust that God would work through his words alone and help those in attendance grasp the meaning of his prayers: “Afterward, feeling my mind covered with the spirit of prayer, I told the interpreters that I found it in my heart to pray to God, and believed, if I prayed right, He would hear me, and expressed my willingness for them to omit interpreting.”

After the meeting, Woolman learned that Papunehang, the Indian chief, approached one of the interpreters and said of the English prayer he had not understood, “I love to feel where words come from.”

I’ve always been struck by the innocent beauty of the chief’s reaction, but it’s pretty apparent to me that while Woolman was praying he wasn’t simultaneously trying to get rid of the gorilla. If he had, the chief’s reaction might have been a little different. I’ve read the prayers I’ve put into a journal years after a painful incident, and I’ve listened to the words coming out of the hearts of people struggling to find a way to forgive; there’s nothing remotely endearing about any of them.

For those of us who struggle with forgiveness, the place where words are formed is a place of constant agitation. It’s the place where memories are replayed over and over again; where the original memories of a rapist’s face or the words of an overbearing mother can’t be easily forgotten. In my experience, feeling the place where the words of an unforgiving heart are formed is more like accidentally leaning on an electric fence than listening to someone recite a poem in a foreign language.

Years ago Lisa and I were traveling from Trenton, New Jersey, to the Jersey shore for the day. A white Volvo station wagon in front of us veered to the right, then turned hard left again and flipped over three times, coming to rest in the grass in the center median. In that split second I was more frightened than any other time I can remember. I quickly pulled over, and when Lisa and I jumped out, we were surprised to see small preschool-age children in the back seat.

We reached in, grabbed one in each arm, and pulled them out. Lisa huddled with the children while I pried the driver- and passenger-side doors open and helped a man and woman, both covered in blood, slide out of their seats. Since these were the days before cell phones, I ran out into the freeway, stopped a car, and asked someone to go get help. Twenty minutes later an ambulance showed up and took them all to the hospital.

I’ll never forget what I saw in that car, but more important, I’ll never forget what I felt—a knot in my chest and a mad rush of adrenaline covered by a blanket of numbness. It’s the only situation that’s ever come close to mirroring the immediate emotional aftereffects of getting ransacked by the gorilla. The place where unforgiving words are formed is a dark, erratic, and anxious place.

When the gorilla moves in, the first thing he unpacks is anxiety. Anxiety masks the real issues involved in forgiving those who have hurt us by locking us into replaying what happened to us over and over and over again. Rather than giving us ways to move on from the pain we’ve experienced, anxiety keeps us trapped in a nonstop mental replay of how we were hurt, complete with all the bewildering emotions we felt when the hurt first happened. Anxiety makes our situation seem more painful and intractable than it actually is, if for no other reason than the more we replay the memories, the more ingrained they become.