4 days ago
16
Meg Keneally
I’ve always been a dramatic soul. As a young teenager, I would stumble home from early high school, fresh from another day of taunts about my weight, the strange protrusions developing on my chest, or the perm I gave myself from a home kit at the weekend (it was the 1980s!). And, of course, I would relay every insult, every slight, every barb to my parents.
My mother would immediately call for destruction to be rained down on the perpetrators from on high.
But my father had a slightly different view.
“Be nice to them,” he said. “Give your tormentors so much sweetness that they develop diabetes.”
To a girl in her early teens, that sounded like nonsense. I was the centre of the universe. Surely, no one had ever been as badly treated as I was! And here my father was, telling me to be nice to them?
I would ask: “Is this some turn-the-other-cheek rubbish?”
My father has quite a distinctive cackle, and I heard it in those moments.
“No, it’s because they don’t know how to handle it. They just don’t know what to do – it drives them crazy!”
Worth a try, I thought.
And, beyond my expectations, it worked.
For a while, I relished the confused looks I would receive whenever I used this tactic. But as I got older, I realised it wasn’t a tactic at all.
Through the stinging barbs and deep pain we all sometimes have to face,being exceedingly nice to those who tormented me became a pathway to peace.
I gradually shed my unfortunate habit of keeping an emotional ledger, of believing that every wrong, real or perceived, HAD to be addressed and resolved for me to move on.
I found that giving grace to those I felt wronged by stopped the corrosive angst of needing to balance that ledger.
I don’t always get it right – in fact, I frequently get it wrong – and of course there are times when one can’t forgive and forget, when one has to fight. But every misstep I make reinforces the value of that advice.
As for Dad’s rationale – “it drives them crazy” – there was sagacity in that too. If he had simply told me to let things go and move on, he would have been greeted by the thousandth teenage eye-roll of the week. By framing it as a way to wrongfoot my tormentors, he ensured it stuck. But he always knew its real value.
And now, so do I.
Thomas Keneally
It is interesting to get plain good, viable advice from the Bible. One expects the Bible to tell you to be good for goodness’s sake and for the subtle and imponderable rewards of that. But in two books ascribed to King Solomon, who reigned from about 970 BC, the Song of Songs and the Book of Proverbs, you get what looks like eroticism for its own sake.
And hence in Proverbs, this encouragement: “if thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink. For you shall heap coals of fire upon his head …”
It doesn’t defend the proposition, but tells you it will embarrass your enemy exquisitely and bring rewards from God as well.
I came from a family where men were supposed to have grievances that were long term – my father nourished a grievance over something that happened, an insult offered by a cousin of his, in a bush post office in the 1920s. Sometimes when my Aunt Annie came down from the bush to visit us, my father would reiterate his grievance, and noted how many decades it had stood, and my aunt would say in a fluting voice, “Tommy, don’t forget that if you make peace, you heap coals of fire on your enemy’s head.”
This was a penetrating image and I had no idea as a child of its origins in Proverbs. During a famed revolt in Ireland in 1798 a method of punishment used by both sides was pitch-capping, in which pitch was poured on the enemy’s head and set alight. “heap coals of fire” indeed …
But it was clear Annie was not talking about literal coals of fire! Nor was the Bible verse, when I became aware of its existence. The revenge mentioned is a benign one in that you raise a number of conflicting and tormenting questions in the target. They are: didn’t he or she notice I’d attacked them? Did they notice but thought it was some form of amiable joke? Do they not consider me worth taking notice or worthy of holding a grievance against?
Like the prophet and Annie says: “coals of fire” indeed.
