Art, Love. Forgiveness: A Talk By Shann Ray Ferch
Vincent Van Gogh said the greatest work of art is to love someone. When I think about love I think about growing up in Montana – land of 100 mountain ranges. I think of the East Coast and how over half the Eastern Seaboard can fit inside Montana. My mother grew up in Cohagen, Montana. Cohagen has eight people. They have a store, they’ve got the back of the house where she lived, and where my grandmother worked as the post-master, and they’ve got two bars. When I think about love, I also think about my daughters who give me the opportunity to have 11 pink shirts. They like to pick them out for me. I like to think about them. I like to think about love, and I love that idea that Vincent Van Gogh brought to us.
Being a husband and a father I have three daughters. Being a psychologist, I have the honor of working with many beautiful people and observing how they come together. I notice that most of us have never been taught the necessary skills around the question of how people’s inner lives interact, and what that might mean once we get angry or are harmed, or once we’ve done damage to someone else.
I’ve also had the grace of being a leadership and forgiveness researcher for the last 20 years. If you look at these interior elements and what they can mean to us, you find some fascinating things. Some of the best research in this area has come out of the University of Washington from John Gottman. I’m amazed at how powerful it is to see what we’ve discovered. Researchers measure not just your behaviors, but your tone of voice, your eye contact, even what you’re thinking about when you’re in conflict. People would come into Gottman’s lab and his team would videotape them for a few days at a time. The researchers were interested in analyzing thoughts and behaviors and attitudes and actions and inactions. They analyzed how we are motivated and what our dreams are for the future. How did do they that? They pulled individuals out of the lab and looked at the tape and said, “When you screamed this at Sally, what was your thought process right there?’” And they analyzed it down to the motivation for each moment.
Gottman became pretty strong at understanding people’s motivations and behaviors. He got to where he could predict divorce in three minutes at a 95 percent rate. What he saw was contempt on the face of a person three times over the course of about 45 seconds. Contempt is what you think it is. It’s the bodily expression of “I hate you.” You can see how some of these things interact. It gets even scarier from there. We are all made up of masculine and feminine. But some of us block our feminine side, to the detriment of society; and some of us block our masculine side, to the detriment of society. There is a life-affirming masculine and a life-deepening feminine. And when we block those, it harms us and others.
When I first experienced the core of this kind of work, it came to me as forgiveness. I think most of us don’t think about forgiveness a lot. When we do, we might think, “Maybe I need to forgive that person.” But on a deeper level, as we grow stronger and more mature, we think, “I need to ask for forgiveness. I need to make atonement.”
I had never been exposed to that until I met my future wife’s father. It took me forever to get up the courage to ask Jennifer for a date, and then she had the gall to say something like, “Sure, I’d love to but first you have to have an interview with my father.”
I had played college basketball and basketball overseas, and I knew that Jennifer’s father was a very intense basketball coach. Think of Bobby Knight. I was not looking forward to that interview. I tried to argue her out of it, but she said, “That’s what we do.” “Seriously?” “Yes.” She was an amazing person, and I really wanted to date her, so I surrendered to the interview.
You have to remember culture, too. My family’s culture is Czech and German. The parents’ bedroom is a relic zone: You don’t go in there, you don’t touch anything. Jennifer’s family has an Irish background. The parents’ bedroom is where everybody gathers at the end of the day. They hang out, they talk, say a prayer, and go off to their beds. So her dad greets me at the front door and says, “Come with me.” Upstairs we go into the parents’ bedroom. When I get there, I am at odds with life – I see two chairs set way too close to each other. With my Czech-German hand, I move my chair back some distance, and I sit down.
And then everything changes. This person, this intense basketball coach, has a heart of strength, beauty, depth and intimacy. It touches me, just thinking about it. He started out by saying, “Here are some of the things I love about you and that I have noticed about you.” That was the first time that I’d heard an adult male talk to me this way. He said seven or eight things. Then he went on to list some things he loved about my mom, and then about my dad.
He said, “I would give you 50 rules but you wouldn’t remember all of them. I’ll give you two. One of them is that Jennifer knows her limitations. Don’t take her beyond those. And the second one is that I don’t want you to have to come to me and say you’re sorry.” These are big ‘guru rules.’ What do they mean, even? They mean something like – you had better be a decent or good person. But still, these ideas would have dropped out the bottom, if he hadn’t pursued an enduring relationship with me – which he did. In the next few years, probably more than a hundred times, he would say, “I’ve got a day trip coming. I’m speaking down in the Tri-Cities. Why don’t you come with me?” We went on these journeys together. He was a great relator and conversationalist. He was humble, ready to grow, fully embracing the feminine, never negating the feminine; understanding the masculine, knowing how to live. It was a great moment in my life to receive that from him.
The first time I ever heard of “forgiveness asking” came from him. He had made a sharp comment at the dinner table to his wife. I didn’t even pick up on it. In my family, on a 100 point scale of verbal violence, his comment was a minus eight. After dinner, he came over to me and said, “I’d like to ask your forgiveness for the way I treated my wife at the dinner table.” I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Ah, you don’t have to ask me.”
And he said, “No, I don’t ask just for you. In our family we ask forgiveness of the person whom we harmed, and also everybody who was there, in order to restore the dignity of the one who was harmed.”
That moment, combined with his investment into my life, changed me entirely.
Forgiveness research is profound around the world right now. People with higher forgiveness capacity have lower depression, they have lower anxiety. They have less heart disease, think of that symbolically: They have less heart disease. They have greater emotional wellbeing, and bridges are being made to stronger immune systems. The Mayo clinic uses forgiveness in its treatment process. The next DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which psychologists use to help make diagnoses – will likely include bitterness as a personality disorder.
What does it take for us to come to a meaningful place with each other? If the greatest work of art is to love one another, how do we move in that direction? Martin Luther King gave it to us: “The oppressor will not willingly give up power.” So don’t be blind or dumb about it. If you’re being wronged, that’s not just going to change. Then he gives us a second moment of illumination when he says, “When we love the oppressor we bring about not only our own salvation but the salvation of the oppressor.” He is noticing that we all oppress and that it’s up to us to come to a deeper and more true experience of one another.
In closing, I think of my grandfather. He was a lovely person and we loved him, but he descended all the way into alcohol and died young. He ended up in state-funded housing in Montana, with nobody near him. That was one of the family’s most disheartening crucibles.
I pair that with a moment with Isabella, who is my third daughter. One day when she was about 4, she was at the kitchen table. I looked at her and I saw how beautiful she was. I looked into her eyes and said, “Why do I love you so much?” She just kept chewing, like “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I get more serious. I gently turned her face to me and asked again: “Why do I love you so much?”
Her answer? “Because you were made to love me.”
This is an excerpted version of a TedX talk given by Shann Ray Ferch in Spokane last March. Ferch teaches in Gonzaga’s Doctoral Program in Leadership Studies, and his research is on forgiveness and servant leadership. He is a former pro basketball player, a poet and award-winning fiction writer. The Spokane TedX event takes place annually at Saint George’s School.