Forgiveness

Clergy, counsellors, and people who lecture and write books about forgiveness all preach reductionism as a strategy for overcoming hot resentment of someone’s nasty behaviour. They say that people who have been harmed should see the hurtful as deeply flawed human beings working out nameless aggressions. Pitiable and inferior, they are examples of failure to thrive. Adults still distressed by abuse, neglect, or rejection in childhood are urged to consider what happened in their parents’ childhoods — often, bad parenting comes from being badly parented. The theory is that understanding the reasons for their parents’ limitations will enable the offspring to acquire a measure of compassion.

Maybe it works. Hillary Clinton apparently forgave her sleazy husband because she knows he had an unhappy childhood.

This technique can be applied to almost any injustice and falls within the rapists-were-beaten-as-children, poor them school of thought, which for some skeptics veers perilously close to non-accountability. The law and commonsense hold that adults are responsible for what they do. While empathy may help people appreciate why others behave badly, the exercise is somewhat patronizing. The offender is reduced to a contemptible hive of neuroses and ungovernable aberrations, which accordingly elevates the injured party to a morally superior person.

Demonizing the enemy is a common coping mechanism in times of adversity. In military terms, it captures the high ground. Catastrophes such as divorce, job loss, rape, robbery, infidelity, and slander are all assaults on personal dignity and self-respect. A sense of being intact — safe — has been violated, and people are dismayed to find themselves for some time emotionally crippled by anger and grief. Betrayal and loss take big chunks out of people’s confidence and leave them feeling excruciatingly vulnerable to random harm.

The starting place, some therapists say, is to accept that something appalling has happened, and it hurts. Denial, a recourse more favoured by men than by women, won’t help. The next step they say, is to develop an off switch. When fury threatens to make the brain reel, people should grasp for distractions. Brooding about revenge only serves to unhinge reason. If people don’t rid themselves of wrath, personal growth stops cold. The hard part comes at the end of the process. The choices are to enter a state of forgiveness, which is a triumph of generosity, or just to put the matter in a box, cover it with a lid, place a brick on the lid, and move on. In healthy people, a perverse state of mind eventually wears itself out.

In yoga, they say that it takes six years of regularly practising meditation to gain spiritual insight. Forgiveness of a great wrong may take longer. The process can’t even begin until the injured person stops crying.

Some people are marvellously unbroken by great injustices. Nelson Mandela smiled gently at his adversaries after twenty-seven years of brutal imprisonment. A worldwide figure of wonder, he even invited his white jailer to his inauguration as South Africa’s president. In Cambodia, a pastor whose family had been wiped out by the Khmer Rouge baptized and forgave a notorious Khmer Rouge leader known as Duch. A university professor in Virginia had an urge to kill the intruder who beat his mother to death, but stopped himself with the thought, “Whose heart is darker? ” And the father of a young girl casually murdered in a street encounter with a teenager she didn’t know attended the trial and sat quietly throughout the appalling testimony. He said he would visit the youth in prison. “I do not think I can forgive him,” he explained, “but perhaps if I know him I will not hate him.”

Forgiveness is hard work. A woman, a devout Roman Catholic who forgave the man who tortured and killed her seven-year-old daughter, said, “Anyone who says forgiveness is for wimps hasn’t tried it.” The reward for giving up scalding thoughts of reprisal is peace of mind. It is worth the candle.