Forgiveness

Book Review
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst The Rwandan Holocaust
By Steve Irwin and Immaculee Ilibagiza

This is a story which will stay with you. Autobiographical, the narrator tells of her childhood as a Tutsi in Rwanda and her narrow escape from the government-sponsored genocide intended to eradicate all Tutsis in Rwanda. Her family was murdered, and she survived because of the sometimes grudging charity of a Hutu Protestant pastor who hid her and six, later eight, other Tutsi women in a tiny bathroom where they crowded together for three months while the Hutu rampage went on, sometimes outside their window, and sometimes inside the house.

The most remarkable aspect of her story is her spiritual journey during those months in the bathroom. Born and raised Catholic, she spent the time, as she puts it, in a corner of her mind communing with God, praying constantly, begging Him for help, and receiving at strategic moments direct help from God. She struggled with the demons of despair and unbelief, and forced her way each time back to God through prayer and meditation. She was able to view her Hutu hunters with compassion and forgiveness. These Hutu who hunted her relentlessly, knowing they had not yet accounted for her death, were her neighbors, her childhood playmates, her teachers and her parents’ friends.

How could she bring herself to forgive those who betrayed and murdered her father, who tortured and dismembered her favorite brother, who clubbed her mother to death? How could she forgive a government who sanctioned, encouraged, inflamed this genocide?

And yet do we not pray daily to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”? Are we not enjoined to love our enemies? Are we not given models of this love and forgiveness—Jesus on the cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”; Maria Goretti, a modern saint who forgave her rapist/murderer before she died and appeared to him later with forgiveness, prompting his conversion?

How often I have struggled with forgiveness. Just saying I forgive you doesn’t really do the job. I think true forgiveness requires letting go of the anger, the pain, the resentment that an offense causes. But it’s even more than that. It is a positive act of love, replacing that anger and pain with love—the kind of love Paul talks about—patient, kind, accepting, … It’s easy to say I forgive you, but its really hard to do. The resentment lurks in hidden corners of the soul and leaps out unexpectedly as a sarcastic comment, a surge of resentment, a moment of renewed anger, or a poor-me-focused story shared for sympathy or attention.

I believe that forgiveness is a unilateral act, as modeled by Christ and by Maria Goretti. It does not require contrition or reform on the part of the forgiven. Repentance is also a unilateral act. When you bring forgiveness and repentance together, you can effect reconciliation. But forgiveness can be accomplished independent of repentance or reconciliation.

I have heard the term forgiveness referred to as psychobabble. I think the genesis of that approach is the reality that true forgiveness, deep-rooted, erasure of the emotions of injury, anger, resentment and pain is so easy to say and so hard to accomplish.

It is not mine, but God’s, to judge the depth of Imaculee’s forgiveness, but I accept it and wonder if I could come to that myself.