Excerpted from Why Forgive?
At some
thoughts one stands perplexed - especially at the sight of men's sin - and
wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use
humble love. If you resolve to do that, once and for all, you can subdue the
whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all
things, and there is nothing else like it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
In
the well-known passage of the Gospels
called the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches us to love our enemies - in fact,
to "bless" those who persecute us. But it wasn't just a sermon. As
his unmistakably compassionate plea from the cross shows - "Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do" - he practiced what he
preached. So did Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who prayed much the same
thing as he was being stoned to death: "Father, do not hold this against
them."
Many
people dismiss such an attitude as self-destructive foolishness. How and why
should we embrace someone intent on harming or killing us? Why not fight back
in self-defense? Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer, is no
stranger to repression, but he takes a very different view of the matter:
For me, the act of forgiveness carries a lot of power. It
is an assertion of one's dignity to have the means and ability to forgive...It
may be difficult to understand, because it turns conventional logic on its
head, but idealistically speaking, I think that if there is to be peace, there
has to be forgiveness...
Though
misunderstood and ridiculed, Raja's understanding of forgiveness is not entirely
unusual - it has been embraced by hundreds of persecuted minorities throughout
history, from the earliest Christian believers, to the Anabaptists of the
radical Reformation, to our century's followers of Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin
Luther King.
It is
probably best explained in this
passage from King's book Strength to Love:
Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to
follow than the command to love our enemies. Some people have sincerely felt
that its actual practice is not possible. It is easy, they say, to love those
who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to
defeat you...?
Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer,
the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love
even for our enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world.
Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical
realist...
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper
darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out
darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do
that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness
multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction...
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy
into a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get
rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and
tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. Love transforms
with redemptive power.
King's
commitment to love as a political
weapon grew out of his faith, but there was a good streak of pragmatism in his
thinking as well. He knew that he and other African-Americans involved in the
civil rights movement would have to live for decades to come with the same
people they were now confronting. If they let their treatment embitter them, it
would soon lead to violence, which would only lead to new cycles of repression
and embitterment. Rather than breaking down the walls of racial hatred, it
would build them higher. Only by forgiving their oppressors, King said, could
African-Americans end the "descending spiral of destruction." Only
forgiveness could bring about lasting change:
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.
Whoever is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is
impossible even to begin the act of loving one's enemies without the prior
acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict
evil and injury upon us.
It is also necessary to realize that the forgiving act
must always be initiated by the person who has been wronged, the victim of some
great hurt, the recipient of some tortuous injustice, the absorber of some
terrible act of oppression. The wrongdoer may request forgiveness. They may
come to themselves, and like the prodigal son, move up some dusty road, their
heart palpitating with the desire for forgiveness. But only the injured
neighbor, the loving father back home, can really pour out the warm waters of
forgiveness.
Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or
putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no
longer remains as a barrier to the relationship. Forgiveness is a catalyst creating
the atmosphere necessary for a fresh start and a new beginning...
To our most bitter opponents we say: We shall match your
capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall
meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall
continue to love you.
We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws,
because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is
cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Send your
hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and
beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured
that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.
One day we shall win our freedom, but not only for
ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win
you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.
In
the spring of 1965 I marched with King
in
Bystanders
later described a scene of utter chaos: white onlookers smashed cameras and
shot out street lights, while police officers brutally attacked black men and
women, some of whom were kneeling and praying on the steps of their church.
Jimmie's
crime was to tackle a state trooper who was mercilessly beating his mother. His
punishment: to be shot in the stomach and clubbed over the head until almost
dead. Denied admission at the local hospital, he was taken to
At
the news of Jimmie's death, we drove to
Deeply
shaken, we attended a memorial service
there. The room was packed with about three thousand people (many more stood
outside), and we sat on a window sill at the back. We never heard one note of
anger or revenge in the service. Instead, a spirit of courage emanated from the
men and women of the congregation, especially as they rose to sing the old
slave song, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'round."
Later,
at a second service in
Afterwards,
at the cemetery, King spoke about forgiveness and love. He pleaded with his
people to pray for the police, to forgive the murderer, and to forgive those
who were persecuting them. Then we held hands and sang, "We shall
overcome." It was an unforgettable moment. If there was ever cause for
hatred or vengeance, it was here. But none was to be felt, not even from
Jimmie's parents.
Not
long ago I read about a remarkable act of forgiveness by the children of
A
few days after this incident, Sheriff Clark was hospitalized with chest pains.
Unbelievably,
Eminent
child psychiatrist Robert Coles
observed the same remarkable attitude of forgiveness among children when he was
working in a
One
child, six-year-old Ruby Bridges, was the sole African American student at her
school, which meant that for a while she was also the only student there. For
weeks she had to be escorted to school by federal marshals. One day, her
teacher saw her mouthing words as she passed the lines of angry white parents
hurling abuse. When the teacher reported this to Coles, he was curious: What
had she said?
When
asked, Ruby said that she had been praying for the parents of her white
classmates. Coles was perplexed. "But why?" "Because they need
praying for," she answered. She had heard in church about Jesus' dying
words, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and
had taken them to heart.
Through
James Christensen, the prior of a
Trappist monastery in
All
If it should happen one day - and it could be today - that
I become a victim of the terrorism that now seems to encompass all the
foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my church, my family,
to remember that my life was given to God and to Algeria; and that they accept
that the sole Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I would like, when the time comes, to have a space of
clearness that would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human
beings, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who will
strike me down.
I could not desire such a death; it seems to me important
to state this: How could I rejoice if the Algerian people I love were
indiscriminately accused of my murder?
My death, obviously, will appear to confirm those who hastily
judged me naïve or idealistic: "Let him tell us now what he thinks of
it!" But they should know that...for this life lost, I give thanks to God.
In this "thank you," which is said for everything in my life from now
on, I certainly include you, my last-minute friend who will not have known what
you are doing...I commend you to the God in whose face I see yours. And may we
find each other, happy "good thieves" in
Like
so many others on both sides of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, Bishara Awad, a Palestinian acquaintance of mine, has
been wounded by his share of injustices. Speaking recently about his life-long
struggle to forgive, he told me:
In 1948, during the terrible war between the Arabs and the
Jewish settlers, thousands of Palestinians died and many more became homeless.
Our own family was not spared. My father was shot dead by a stray bullet, and
there was no decent burial place. No one could leave the area for fear of
getting shot at by either side; there was not a priest nor a minister to say a
prayer. So Mother read to us from the Bible, and the men who were present
buried my father in the courtyard. There was no way they could have taken him
to the regular cemetery in the city.
Mother thus became a widow at the age of twenty-nine, and
she was left with seven children. I was only nine years old. For weeks we were
caught up in the crossfire and were unable to leave our basement room. Then one
night, the Jordanian army forced us to run to the
In the
Mother had been trained as a nurse, and she got a job at a
hospital for $25 a month. She worked at night and continued her studies during
the day, and we children were put in orphanages.
My sisters were accepted in a Muslim school, and we boys
were placed in a home run by a British woman. To me, this was a real blow.
First I had lost my father, and now I was away from my mother and my family. We
were allowed to visit home once a month, but otherwise we stayed at the boys'
home for the next twelve years. Here, with my two brothers and eighty other
boys, my suffering continued. We never had enough to eat. The food was terrible
and the treatment harsh.
As
an adult, Bishara went to school in the
That first year I was very frustrated. I did not accomplish
much and I felt defeated...There was mounting hatred against the Jewish
oppressors: all of my students were Palestinians, and all had suffered in the
same way I had...I wasn't able to help my students, because of the overriding
hatred in me. I had harbored it since childhood without even realizing it.
One night I prayed to God in tears. I asked forgiveness
for hating the Jews and for allowing hatred to control my life...Instantly he
took away my frustration, hopelessness, and hatred and replaced it with love.
In a
culture that emphasizes
self-preservation and individualism, forgiveness is scoffed at so routinely
that most people never stop to consider its potential to heal wounds such as
the ones Bishara described. But neither do they consider the fruits of its
alternative, which is bitterness.
Naim
Ateek, a well-known Palestinian priest in
When people hate, its power engulfs them and they are
totally consumed by it...Keep struggling against hatred and resentment. At
times you will have the upper hand, at times you will feel beaten down.
Although it is extremely difficult, never let hatred completely overtake you...
Never stop trying to live the commandment of love and forgiveness.
Do not dilute the strength of Jesus's message; do not shun it; do not dismiss
it as unreal and impractical. Do not cut it to your size, trying to make it
more applicable to real life in the world. Do not change it so that it will
suit you. Keep it as it is, aspire to it, desire it, and work for its
achievement.
Far
from leaving us weak and vulnerable, forgiveness is empowering, both to the
person who grants it and the one who receives it. In bringing true closure to
the most difficult situations, it allows us to lay aside the riddles of
retribution and human fairness, and to experience true peace of heart. Finally,
it sets into motion a positive chain reaction that passes on the fruits of our
forgiveness to others.