In 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, hopes were high that apartheid was in its dying days. Father Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and a chaplain to the African National Congress, had been living in exile in Zimbabwe. He thought he might soon return to South Africa to begin building a new post-apartheid nation. But apartheid’s henchman would not go quietly. Three months after Mandela’s release Lapsley received a letter bomb that blew off his hands and an eye and nearly killed him.

Lapsley has gone on to transform his tragedy into a global message for healing and social justice. He founded the Institute for Healing of Memories in South Africa and worked alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help victims of apartheid. He is now the president of the Healing of Memories Global Network and has run workshops for genocide survivors in Rwanda, indigenous people in Australia, and combat veterans in the U.S. He has received numerous international awards and wrote a memoir, “Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer.”

I met Father Michael, as he is known, in 1984 in Zimbabwe, where I was a young reporter covering the South African liberation struggle. He was the hip activist priest who everyone sought out to get information and contacts. He taught me about South African history and politics from the perspective of someone who was shaping it.

I spoke with Lapsley this week while he was in Iowa where he was speaking, teaching and leading a church service.

“I'd quite like to meet the person who sent me the bomb and say, ‘Thank you very much, you sent me a letter bomb,’” Lapsley reflected. “Of course it was an act of evil. But thanks to you, I now have a worldwide ministry, I've been able to set up an organization that has a small footprint across the world, for which I am very grateful. I've been able to create spaces where healing happens, where people are able to have their pain heard and acknowledged. So thank you, sir. What about you?”

Lapsley said of his own journey, “I realized that if I was filled with hatred and bitterness, they would have failed to kill the body (but) they would have killed the soul, and I would remain their permanent prisoner. And I wasn't interested in being anybody's prisoner.”

Lapsley said that soldiers are “all damaged by war.” The workshops that he runs encourage them to share their stories with one another.  “That helps them to recover their own humanity. Because one of the terrible things about war is the way you see two totally dehumanize the other.”



Trauma and recovery are part of the human condition. “Healing is difficult, but it's possible,” said Lapsley. “We don't have to be prisoners of the past.”