Loyalty is the nature of intergenerational relationships between families, communities, and nations. It has to do with ethical obligations, and with the conflicts, they are inevitably entangled in. These conflicts can cause them to be trapped in conflicting loyalties when they are forced to make critical decisions to break their visible solidarity with their families, the past, culture, faith, etc. As loyalty is an irrevocable bond between family, community members, and members of a nation it is essentially about being.
Huyse (2009:7) in his book all things pass, except the past already indicated then those brutal repressions such as apartheid, the situation in the Middle East, Ruanda, the former Yugoslavia, the holocaust, and many others, will never die completely. The unanswered questions and the sadness these events leave behind live on in the minds of those who experienced them. They are perpetuated as a ‘phantom pain’ in the bodies of the coming generations. Where conflicting loyalties are undermined or not recognized, they can become invisible; causing the trauma, they bear, to become frozen. In this way, in many contexts throughout the world, population groups tend to colonize an episode from the past to use and abuse it within the current context. Such a cocktail of historical ingredients is explosive. One should therefore not underestimate the deep rootedness of loyalty within these relations that play a key role in the transference of narratives from one generation to the next. Processes of reconciliation should include a non-judging understanding of conflicting loyalties when dealing with invisible intergenerational frozen conflicts. What is needed form the discipline of pastoral care is to look for connections and balances, which can be life-giving and make healing possible.