A season of forgiveness...

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Forgive and forget.

Turn the other cheek.

Love thy neighbor. This is what we're called to do. Every day of our lives. But most especially this week, Holy Week.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. This is what we pray. But how do you forgive? How do you let go of hurt and anger and hate?

Petty things cause such wide rifts. A neighbor invites a dozen kids to a birthday party, but excludes your son. How could she be so insensitive?

"Why doesn't anybody like me, Mommy?" the child asks. And anger hardens and becomes cement around the heart.

A friend betrays you. You tell her things in secret, and she tells these things to someone else. So you never talk to her again. And hate takes root where love once bloomed.

If such slights can turn love into hate; if what someone says or doesn't say can kill a relationship, then how is it possible to forgive the big hurts, the ones that are irreparable?

Two men lose their daughters to drunk drivers. One man weeps and rages and pummels the walls in his daughter's room and sits on her bed night after night, hugging her pillow, smelling her smell, asking why, cursing God, praying that it isn't true, that it hasn't happened, that his little girl will bounce back in the room any minute and that life will be okay again.

But she doesn't come back. She can't. And the man has to accept this. After a while he does - after counseling, praying. After turning his pain over to God and begging for help, he finds he can forgive his daughter's killer.

But the other man cannot - or will not, or doesn't want to. Who knows. His pain is all mixed up with his anger, his sorrow and his loss. He hurts all the time. He is like a man covered with third degree burns. Even the air makes him scream. How can he forgive the person who did this to him, who has caused him this agony? And why should he forgive? What right does the perpetrator have to forgiveness?

"Hatred is an acid that does more damage to the vessel in which it is stored than to the object on which it is poured."

Perhaps. You look at people who hate, and you can see this is true. Hate destroys them, not anyone else. But the question is, how do you not hate? How do you turn the other cheek when your eye has been gouged out and your scalp is in flames and your lips are swollen and half the bones in your face are broken?

"As I have said since the day they (the IRA) took away my daughter, I must follow God's law, not man's. He teaches us that we must forgive those who trespass against us," Gordon Wilson said last week. Wilson's 20-year-old daughter, Marie, was killed five years ago. They were attending a war memorial service in Northern Ireland when bombs planted by the IRA exploded. Marie died while holding her father's hand.

"I bear no ill will, I bear no grudge," Wilson said at the time. And he doesn't.

Imagine - forgiving the terrorists who killed your daughter, forgiving the father who abused you, forgiving the men who assaulted you.

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

A man, mocked and beaten, hangs on a cross, thorns pushed into his brow, nails hammered into his hands and feet, his tongue swollen from thirst. When he asks for water, he's given vinegar. He's suffering. He's being murdered.

And he says this: Forgive them.

He is the example. He shows us how we're supposed to live.

But forgiving is the hardest thing to do.

It makes me wonder, if we have it in our power to change the world simply by refusing to hate. What would happen if tomorrow we woke up hate free?

If the world had amnesia and couldn't use history and old hurts to justify its fights? If grudges and animosities and revenge didn't exist anymore?

If we forgot how to hate, would there be world peace? Or would the conflicts start all over again. "I don't like the way you looked at me." "I was in line first." "This is my land." "Don't tell me what I can and cannot do."

Last week, near the banks of the River Kwai, a World War II Japanese interpreter bowed and apologized to a British soldier he tortured 50 years ago. The former enemies, now 75 years old, shook hands and wept.

"I'm sorry" and "I forgive you." These are healing words that can never come too late