Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
I’ve had a couple of letters this week from readers who aren’t sure about Desmond Tutu’s claim that there is nothing that can’t be forgiven, and no one undeserving of forgiveness. They both brought up the subject of Hitler and his ilk (Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao Zedong, to name a few). My husband mentioned Hitler, too, during a dinner table conversation about all this. He had to respectfully disagree with Tutu, he said; it *is* possible to commit unforgivable acts. (When you’re married to a professional philosopher, dinner table conversations tend to be pretty interesting.)
Because forgiveness is such an important part of getting along with each other, because it’s such a difficult and complicated subject, and because I had to cut my thoughts about it short last week, I want to talk a little more about it this week, and maybe next time, too. We’ll see how it goes.
First, how about a piece of music? For this issue of Odd Company, I’ve chosen a song that shows how the world looks when you haven’t yet forgiven the one who hurt you. Chances are you’ve heard some version of this one before. Dozens of musicians have done covers of it, including such unlikely candidates as Bobby Darin and Nina Simone. It was performed by its composer, Randy Newman, on his debut album in 1968. I thought about using that version here, but to be honest, Randy Newman kind of sounds like he has a mouthful of oatmeal. I want to make sure you can hear the lyrics clearly. So I’ve chosen this one by Norah Jones, who has a truly beautiful voice and great diction. Here she is, singing “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.”
I imagine there are many of you, dear readers, who have trouble believing there’s any reason to forgive leaders who coldly commit mass murder. And, hey, what about the 9-11 terrorists? What about people who go into crowded places — theaters, houses of worship, schools — and go on shooting sprees? Should we forgive them?
In 2012, I made my first (and only, so far) trip to Africa. Mainly, I wanted to see the large animals of the Masai Mara in their natural habitat while there were still some to be seen. The group John and I signed up with was to spend two weeks doing just that. But there was an additional offering. For a price, we could add a week in Rwanda, and a peek at the mountain gorillas on the Rwanda-Congo border. (I mentioned them in “How to Speak Gorilla” a few weeks ago.)
I loved the idea of trekking through the steep rain forest to see the gorillas. Still, I hesitated. It was Rwanda, after all, site of one of the most horrifying cases of mass murder in human history — the Rwandan genocide. In the spring and early summer of 1994, members of two Rwandan groups — the Tutsis and the Hutus — spent a hundred days killing each other, mostly with rocks, farm implements, and machetes. When the rampage was over, a fifth of the population was dead. Another two fifths had fled to neighboring countries. In a land that was once the most densely populated place on Earth, there weren't enough people left to bury the million bodies. The capitol city, Kigali, was a scorched, disease-ridden ghost town with no services, no clean water, and no food. Thousands of children were among the dead. But 95,000 surviving orphaned children roamed the streets uncared for.
While some of the ringleaders of the genocide were eventually tried and incarcerated, so many Rwandans participated in the madness that it was impossible to imprison them all. As a result, many of those who wielded the machetes are walking the streets as I write this. Today, Rwanda is a model African nation. There are schools, public toilets, and abundant public water spigots. There’s plenty of food. The citizens of Kigali look no different from anyone else. They chat or eat with friends on the sidewalks and in cafes. Arm-in-arm, they go about their business. There are happy faces and sad ones in very normal ratios.
How could this possibly be the case? Part of the reason is a concerted effort on the part of Rwandans to forgive both their murderous neighbors and themselves. Rwanda is one of the places where Desmond Tutu (and many others) worked on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. The Rwandans had a stark choice. They could either forgive and move on, or consign themselves to an apocalyptic future of strife and dysfunction. They chose to forgive.
So how did they do it?
First, we need to understand that forgiveness is not the same thing as absolution. Who could possibly absolve Adolph Hitler? Maybe Jesus could do it, or the Bodhisattva, but they are not exactly mere mortals. And as divine beings, they would not have to live with the consequences of letting such people get away with their crimes. So forgiving does *not* mean telling someone it’s okay that they did what they did. It does not mean letting yourself off the hook if you’ve hurt someone. There are consequences for deliberately hurting people, as there must be in our imperfect world.
Second, forgiveness is not the same thing as forgetting. For one thing, it’s probably not possible to truly forget that someone or something hurt us, or that we hurt someone else. Remembering is a pretty deeply evolved survival trait. But also, I’m trying to imagine a situation in which forgetting what happened would be a good thing, and I can’t. I guess it’s possible I’m experiencing a failure of imagination, but I’m pretty sure I’m not. When we forget what happened, we put ourselves in danger of repeating our mistakes. So there is no “forgive and forget.” That is neither possible nor desirable.
After we forgive, whether it’s the other person or our self, the relationship we had with the other party or group is never the same again. We might have to end the relationship. Sometimes continuing a relationship would place us in danger of further harm. But ending it isn’t always possible — as when the other person is dead, or is the parent of our children, or a member of our family. In that case, we have to create a new relationship with the forgiven one or ones, or those of whom we asked forgiveness — a relationship that takes into account what we’ve learned about them or what they’ve learned about us.
So what is our goal when we forgive? What are we hoping to get out of it? All of us have been in situations where someone has hurt us, or we have hurt someone, and we are obsessed and burdened by the pain of it. Everyone knows first-hand how that feels. It’s crazy-making. It keeps us awake at night; makes us distracted and irritable. If it’s bad enough, it gives us heartburn, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and possibly a substance abuse problem or an autoimmune disease. It might…uh…cause us to throw chairs, even.
Does this sound like suffering? Boy, it sure does to me. How do we get ourselves free from that awful, helpless feeling of having been wronged and not being able to do anything about it? We do it by accepting that the thing happened and can’t be changed. We try to understand why it happened, to whatever degree we can. And then we deliberately choose to let go of our resentment. We forgive and get on with our life.
Here’s a question. When we have a wound, what do we do to help it heal? Well…we might apply pressure to stop the bleeding; we would probably clean it thoroughly; we might bandage it up, and take an aspirin. In short, we care for our self. That’s what forgiveness is. It’s a way of tending to our wound and helping it heal.
Forgiveness is, first and foremost, something we do for our self. It is an act of self-compassion. It doesn’t require anything at all from the person who hurt us. They might not want to apologize or ask for our forgiveness. They might not be able to. Likewise, the person we hurt might no longer be there to hear our apology or our plea for forgiveness. And even if they are, they might not respond. Forgiveness is a way of healing our self. And, because everything we do affects everyone else, it is just as Desmond Tutu says: “Forgiveness is nothing less than the way we heal the world. We heal the world by healing each and every one of our hearts.”1 I know it’s a hard thing to sell, but I truly believe this: The best reason to find forgiveness in our hearts for someone like Hitler is that it helps to heal not only us, but also one of the world’s most enormous wounds.
In closing, here’s a poem I wrote not long after returning from Rwanda. Ah, one last thing. The Applied Compassion class ends at the beginning of November. I’m considering continuing Odd Company anyway, though maybe not weekly. If you have an opinion, let me know, either by commenting, or by writing to me. Till next time!
INTORE
(Rwandan Dance of Heroes)
The night before,
black animals, long-armed, bright-toothed
chase me. I can’t breathe
and I wake, grateful for the stars,
afraid of sunrise.
I dress, whispering
-- It is over now.
So it seems,
the streets lively
with scrubbed children,
mothers in bright scarves,
men arm-in-arm walking
to church,
the air already heavy
with summer and lunch.
Now we climb, my friends and I
along those deep borders
between potato fields
where skulls still appear.
Plow blades lift them
out of the earth
while bees hum
and cattle wander, lowing.
Further up, we reach the jungle.
A sweet-faced man offers me water
and I drink, stealing glimpses
of his shaved head
and the long, parallel furrows
a machete made
when he was two or three.
Tutu, Desmond; Tutu, Mpho. The Book of Forgiving.