Reconciliation

May 28, 2023

To me, reconciliation means making a relationship whole.   According to Confucianism, there are five key relationships in one’s life.  Parents/child, husband/wife, elder/younger siblings, teacher/student, and friend/friend.  They are the source of our joy and sometimes pain.  They are the building blocks for our characters. And they have helped define who we are today. 

As parts of many ideas for the term “Covenant”.  I am focused on one simple thing.  To me, Covenant is about making a promise. I was raised to keep my word and expect others to do the same. This is the foundation on which we build real relationships.  My father is a real stickler when it comes to promises. When someone said, “Let us have lunch, Doctor Young.”  He would say, “When?”

Recently, someone broke his promise and did not do his part of the project.  The rest of the group had to spend extra time and effort making sure the work was done.  I am sure he had a very good reason not to follow through.  But all he had to do was to communicate to us that he would not make it.  This made me wonder if perhaps his promise was not a promise but rather a suggestion or an idea. I wonder if I made a mistake by taking him seriously.  This is too much work to sort out who is dependable and who is not.  I just want to be able to count on people.  Of course, I was full of judgment and wallowed in my injury for a while. 

Just because we are the product of our relationships, it does not mean they are unchangeable.  We can work to improve on them. How do we mend the broken fence or the broken heart so we can be whole again? Building a healthy relationship requires a lot of courage, compassion, communication, negotiation, and responsibility. Having suffered from moral injury, many Vietnam veterans went back to Vietnam to reconcile with the painful past as a form of atonement for the death and destruction they caused by simply following orders.  As part of the restorative justice program, victims and perpetrators sit together in dialogue to share their experiences and reconcile their broken souls.  

I believe that most of us are born innocent and whole.  But the unmet, uneven expectations and broken promises in many of our relationships caused us to fragment our innocent selves.  We end up withholding parts of ourselves in relationships. We stop trusting the outside world and become dangerously close to being untrustworthy.  This is how we have become separate and isolated.  Consequently, this has led to more broken relationships. These unfinished businesses occupy our hearts, dampen our spirits, and sack our energy. These are the shackles of our lives. 

Of course, sometimes it is too late to go back to reconcile with others or they are not interested.  The only thing we can do is to mend and heal the relationship we have with ourselves. To reconcile within, we must heal our perceived injury, break our shackles, and care for our broken parts so that we don’t project onto the world and break more promises in new relationships.  

We must not let our broken past dictate our future. Let us come home to our whole selves again.