From the diocese:

Modelling Compassion, Courage and Reconciliation: Last week, the Diocese of Edmonton was privileged to host Fr. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and restorative justice advocate from South Africa. While facilitating a workshop at King’s University College on Saturday, Lapsley described his role in the movement to end apartheid, which led to his exile by the South African Government in 1976. He spent 16 years as a chaplain for the African National Congress (ANC) in Lesotho and Zimbabwe.

In 1990, upon returning from Canada where he toured the country to help Canadians understand apartheid, Lapsley received a parcel deceivingly labeled as religious magazines. The package exploded, destroying his hands, blinding him in one eye, and damaging his hearing. The sinister act rendered Lapsley “as helpless as a baby for months”. “There were times I thought it might be better to be dead,” he says. “But God was present with me”. Prayers, love and support from people around the world – especially Canadians – lifted his spirits and incredibly, one year after the letter bomb attack, he was able to return to Canada to say thank-you for the “avalanche” of support.

Thus began Fr. Lapsley’s journey from victimhood to survivor. Eventually he would come to view himself as “more of a priest with no hands, than I was with two hands”. This courageous and compassionate man now runs the Institute for the Healing of Memories in Cape Town, where he seeks to accompany others on their journeys to healing and wholeness. He leads Healing of Memories workshops, which provide participants with a safe and scared space to share their stories and begin the journey to healing.

“When something terrible happens to us, it either causes us to diminish or to grow, but never are we the same,” he says.

Fr. Lapsley began his workshop in Edmonton by acknowledging the First Nations people that first walked this sacred land and the pain they carry from generation to generation. In fact, many of the people attending the workshop were local representatives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, established in 2008 to tell the history of Indian Residential Schools and guide a process of reconciliation. Sadly, Lapsley pointed out that South Africans actually modelled their system of apartheid after the Canadian Indian Reserve System. “As people of faith, indigenous people and Canadians, we have gifts to give one another, and I hope we can learn from the mistakes that were made,” he said. “Healing is about integrating into ourselves the full reality of what has happened and to be at peace,” he says. “The scars are still there, but they are not bleeding.”

Read more about Fr. Lapsley’s visit to the diocese in the January issue of The Messenger. For information about the Institute for Healing of Memories, visit: www.healing-memories.org.