This “Coral Tree Life Lesson” is an extract from Tutu’s piece ‘I Am Sorry’ – the Three Hardest Words to Say (originally published in the Guardian, I think).

I felt this particular passage — about the constant practice of forgiveness parents are forced to practice — would be particularly helpful for adult children engaged in Western therapy today.

Tutu’s wisdom offers a powerful alternative & challenges the all-prevalent western mantra: “My parents and my childhood are the root of all my suffering.”

“As a father … raising children has sometimes felt like training for a forgiveness marathon. Like other parents, my wife, Leah, and I could create a whole catalogue of the failures and irritations our children have served up.”

Parenthood Is a Constant Practice of Forgiveness

by the Incomparable, Wise Desmond Tutu aka the Arch

As a father myself, raising children has sometimes felt like training for a forgiveness marathon.

Like other parents, my wife, Leah, and I could create a whole catalogue of the failures and irritations our children have served up.

As infants, their loud squalls disturbed our slumber. Even as one or the other of us stumbled out of bed, the irritation at being woken and the thoughts of the fatigue that would lie like a pall over the coming day gave way to the simple acknowledgment that this was a baby. This is what babies do.

The loving parent slides easily into the place of acceptance, even gratitude, for the helpless bundle of tears. Toddler tantrums might provoke an answering anger in a mother or father, but it will be quickly replaced by the understanding that a little person does not yet have the language to express the flood of feelings contained in his or her body. Acceptance comes.

As our own children grew, they found new (and remarkably creative) ways of testing our patience, our resolve and our rules and limits. We learned time and again to turn their transgressions into teaching moments. But mostly we learned to forgive them over and over again, and fold them back into our embrace.

We know our children are so much more than the sum of everything they have done wrong. Their stories are more than rehearsals of their repeated need for forgiveness. We know that even the things they did wrong were opportunities for us to teach them to be citizens of the world. We have been able to forgive them because we have known their humanity. We have seen the good in them.  

Further Reading & Resources

• ‘I Am Sorry’ – the Three Hardest Words to Say (Tutu’s entire piece on forgiveness in which he details how he learned to forgive his own father)
• “Healing & Forgiveness Are the Only Source of Life” by Walter Brueggemann