The Destructive Power of Bitterness: Lessons from The Great Stories
Bitterness and resentment can consume us, leading to
isolation and regret. In The Window’s Illusion, a man’s envy of his roommate’s
view turns into resentment, ultimately leading to a tragic outcome. This story
serves as a powerful reminder of how holding onto negative emotions can blind
us to the beauty of life.
Story keywords: Bitterness, Greed, Deception,
Redemption, Revenge, Envy, Resentment, Regret, Perception, Forgiveness,
Healing, Resilience, Compassion, Empathy, Temptation, Trapped, Letting Go,
Destruction
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The Greatest Forger
It was perhaps the greatest hoax in art history. Han van Meegeren was
an artist with a grudge. Painting in the Netherlands Pre-World War 2, critics
mercilessly panned his exhibitions. One critic described him as “A gifted
technician who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance
school, he has every virtue except originality.”
Stung, van Meegeren decided to strike back. He painted a
work with flourishes of the style of the great Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer,
titled it “The Supper at Emmaus”, and submitted it to the
prominent critic Abraham Bredius.
Bredius took the bait, writing that “It is a wonderful
moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted
with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master… And what a picture! We have
here a – I am inclined to say the – masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of
Delft.” The art world gasped, the
painting was sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars, and displayed in
the Boijmans Gallery in Rotterda.
Han van Meegeren planned to expose the forgery at the
opening of the Gallery’s 400 Years of European Art exhibition, in which
his forgery was given pride of place. His critics would be humiliated and their
reputations shattered.
Greed, however, got the better of him. Rather than exposing
the forgery, he made more, raking in millions more dollars. When the Nazis
swept through Europe, he even managed to sell The Supper at Emmaus to them.
This almost proved his undoing. After the war the victorious
Allied forces were determined to return the artworks collected by the Nazis to
their previous owners.
A receipt led two soldiers from the Allied Art Commission to
the studio of van Meegeren. They wanted to know from whom van Meegeren had
bought the artwork.
Unwilling to divulge the truth, van Meegeren was arrested on
charges of treason and faced the death penalty. Confined in prison, facing
death, van Meegeren had a change of heart. He
confessed, but no-one believed him. Experts testified that the work was indeed
an original by the Dutch master Vermeer.
The only way to prove his innocence was to produce another
fake, and so he did, spending weeks literally painting for his life!
The final twist to the story is that van Meegren was not
only acquitted, but became a national hero, for he had fooled the Nazis, shown
them to be the corrupt regime everyone knew they were.
Source: information found in “The
forger who fooled the world” The Telegraph, Aug 5, 2006
The Window’s Illusion
Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital
room. One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to
help drain the fluid from his lungs. His bed was next to the room’s only
window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back.
The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives
and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military
service, where they had been on vacation. And every afternoon when the man in
the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his
roommate all the things he could see outside the window.
The man in the other bed began to live for those one-hour
periods when his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and
colour of the outside world.
The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake, the man
said. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model
boats. Lovers walked arm in arm amid flowers of every colour of the rainbow.
Grand old trees graced the landscape, and a fine view of the city skyline could
be seen in the distance. As the man by the window described all this in
exquisite detail, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes
and imagine the picturesque scene.
One warm afternoon the man by the window described a parade
passing by. Although the other man couldn’t hear the band, he could see it in
his mind’s eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptive
words. Unexpectedly, an alien thought entered his head: Why should he have all
the pleasure of seeing everything while I never get to see anything ?
It didn’t seem fair. As the thought fermented the man felt
ashamed at first. But as the days passed and he missed seeing more sights, his
envy eroded into resentment and soon turned him sour. He began to brood and he
found himself unable to sleep. He should be by that window – that thought now
controlled his life.
Late one night as he lay staring at the ceiling, the man by the window began to cough. He was choking on the fluid in his lungs. The other man watched in the dimly lit room as the struggling man by the window groped for the button to call for help. Listening from across the room he never moved, never pushed his own button which would have brought the nurse running.
In less
than five minutes the coughing and choking stopped, along with the sound of
breathing. Now there was only silence, deathly silence.
The following morning the day nurse arrived to bring water
for their baths. When she found the lifeless body of the man by the window, she
was saddened and called the hospital attendants to take it away — no works, no
fuss. As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked if he could be
moved next to the window. The nurse was happy to make the switch, and after
making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone.
Slowly, painfully, he propped himself up on one elbow to
take his first look. Finally, he would have the joy of seeing it all himself.
He strained to slowly turn to look out the window beside the bed.
It faced a blank wall.
Source: Author Unknown.
A Mother Forgives
In June 1973, Marietta Jaeger went camping in Badlands National Park with her husband,
Bill, and their five children. As they slept in their tents one night, their seven-year-old
daughter, Susie, was kidnapped.
Marietta suffered all the pain and emotional turmoil you
would expect in such a nightmarish situation. In the days immediately following
the abduction, she was surrounded by people who talked about the kidnapper in
venomous terms, routinely characterizing him as inhuman (even though his
identity and gender were still a mystery).
Despite this climate of anger and vengeance, something
inside Marietta began to shift as the days of waiting turned into weeks. As
reported in the May/June 1998 issue of Health Magazine, Marietta heard a voice.
“What Marietta heard was God telling her, ‘I don’t want you to feel this way.’
As she pondered the message, the weight on her chest seemed to lift and her
stomach relaxed. She fell into the first deep sleep since Susie vanished.” This
was the beginning of her commitment to releasing her anger and finding a path
to forgiveness.
One year after the abduction the kidnapper called Marietta’s
home. Because she had used the intervening months praying for forgiveness –
searching within for the strength to find the humanity buried somewhere within
the kidnapper – she was able to convey genuine empathy as she spoke with him.
Despite the obvious risks to the kidnapper, Marietta kept
him on the phone for more than an hour, ultimately providing the FBI with
enough information to locate and capture him. His name was David Meirhofer.
He had abducted and killed other children. In FBI custody,
he confessed to murdering Susie Jaeger a week after taking her from the
family’s tent. A few hours later, he committed suicide.
Given Meirhofer’s horrific revelation, it would be
understandable for Marietta to abandon the course of forgiveness. Her husband
never let go of his anger and he died of a heart attack at 56 after suffering
for years with bleeding ulcers, but Marietta stayed the course.
She began travelling around the country to speak with others
about forgiveness, sharing her experience. She even befriended the kidnapper’s
mother, Eleanor Huckert. “She and Huckert went together to visit the graves of
their children,” the health article concludes. “Afterward, the two mothers sat
at the Huckerts’ dining room table sipping coffee and thumbing through old
scrapbooks.
There was David on the front porch – a rosy-cheeked little
boy, scrubbed and eager to set out for his first day of school.
As she studied the smiling boy in the snapshot, Marietta
felt that her struggle to invest the faceless criminal with humanity was
complete. ‘If you remain vindictive, you give the offender another victim,’ she
says. ‘Anger, hatred, and resentment would have taken my life as surely as
Susie’s life was taken.'”
Source: reported by The Forgiveness Project
The Monkey Trap: A Tale of Greed and Capture
In early 2001 some towns in India were stricken by a plague
of monkeys. The monkeys were so numerous they would invade homes, bite people,
and make off with food supplies.
It was agreed the monkeys would have to be caught and
relocated. The people in these towns resorted to a traditional method for
catching them. They gathered their old milk bottles, tied them to the ground,
and then placed something sweet such as a lolly inside the bottle. \
Then when a monkey comes along and sees the sweet he places
his hand inside the bottle, but with the sweet enclosed in his palm his fist is
too big to get back out the bottle.
Our monkey will pull and push in an effort to get that sweet
out, but he will not let it go, not even as his captors approach. And so the
monkey is caught, literally with his hand in the lolly jar!
Application: Bitterness, forgiveness: unless we let
go of our hurts and bitterness, we will become trapped by the past, wanting to
move forward yet unable to. Yet this is difficult, as we find it perversely
attractive to hold onto our pain and bitterness.
Application: Sin, Temptation: often in life we are
like the monkey, presented with an attractive offer, yet knowing that unless we
let go of it, it will destroy us.
Source: reported in news stories at the time of the episode when
it happened.