Nelson Mandela is one of my heroes (as for many others). Desmond Tutu isn’t far behind. In 1982 I did 6 months’ voluntary work in South Africa. It was impossible then to see apartheid being dismantled without major bloodshed. And yet it happened. Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a key part of this.
Roll on a few years, and I was struggling to forgive someone. It involved significant hurt for those close to me and myself. I discovered ‘The Forgiveness Project’, an online resource from Tutu and his daughter Mpho. I worked through the programme over the recommended 40 days. It gave a Fourfold Path: Telling the story, Naming the hurt, Granting forgiveness, Renewing or releasing the relationship. It was invaluable. I have re-used it since. ‘As we forgive those who trespass against us…’
‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word,’ sang Elton John. We could add ‘forgiveness seems to be the hardest deed’. We’ll lose something of ourselves if we forgive, we often feel. And anger may be justified, justice too. But when we do forgive, we tend to find we’ve gained rather than lost something. The project helped me learn that our forgiving shouldn’t be dependent on the other’s apology, otherwise it’s us that remains chained – forgiveness brings freedom to the forgiver. Large things may take years. Smaller things, we may just need to swallow our bruised ego and let it go. Often we need to forgive the same thing again and again. Sometimes it’s ourselves we need to forgive.
Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes, ‘In my fourteen years as a jail chaplain, I met people who had done things that are wrong, sinful, immoral, or “bad”; yet when I drew close to a particular life, I found that the human heart is most often either sincere, mistaken, or afraid. From that place, they sought apparent good but not the true good. It made them do some stupid things.’ Stepping into others’ shoes helps.
How many of life’s problems – our own private ones and on the world stage – have relationship
problems at heart? How many of those would be eased, even solved, by forgiveness? An exercise
for a rainy day! ‘Forgiveness is the way we stop our human community from way we stop our human community from unravelling,’ wrote the Tutus.
‘Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave,’ said Indira Gandhi. May we be brave.
