Conger

(Photo: The Rev. Willie Akena, Diocese of Northern Uganda)

An Anglican priest who lost his hands and an eye in a terror attack by the former South African apartheid regime travelled to Northern Uganda last month to meet with victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The Rev. Michael Lapsley, the director of the Institute for Healing Memories in Cape Town, met with mutilated victims of the LRA as well refugees from the fighting that has ravaged Northern Uganda for the past two decades.

“We have something horrible in common that changed our lives,” he told a group of amputees. In its civil war with the Ugandan government, the LRA has terrorized villages with a campaign of destruction and murder that includes amputating the hands, feet or lips of perceived enemies.

In a talk to the Mother’s Union of the Diocese of Northern Uganda, Fr. Lapsley recounted his struggle to forgive those who had crippled him, urging them to put aside their hatred also and give their lives over to Christ and be healed.

A native of New Zealand, Fr. Lapsley trained for the ministry in Australia and went out to South Africa in 1973 to serve as a university chaplain. In 1976 the government refused to renew his visa due to his political activities. He left South Africa for Lesotho and then Zimbabwe, serving as a chaplain for the African National Congress (ANC).

In April 1990 a letter bomb disguised in the pages of a religious magazine posted from South Africa blew off his hands and blinded him in one eye.

On Nov 14 at a meeting in Gulu he said: “I had a choice, Am I going to have hatred and bitterness all my life or am I going to travel a journey of healing? “

“I realized that if I was full of hatred then I would be a victim for ever, they have failed to kill the body but I would have killed the soul,” he said.

There was a conception that healing occurred in an instant, “like taking tablets and everything will be okay. But people who have been hurt deeply the journey of healing takes some time,” he said.

He urged the Mother’s Union to “offer your selves to listen to the pain of others not just once but again and again” and “listen not only with our ears but also with our hearts.”