On Forgiveness

Forgiveness featured large in the media this week. Dear old Emily Bishop, doyen resident of Coronation Street, the UK’s longest running soap opera, had become a misery as she battled with her inability to respond positively to a plea for forgiveness. The gunman who had killed her husband forty years ago, having completed his prison sentence and become, like Emily, a pious Christian, had returned to the Street in search of her forgiveness. As Emily relived traumatic past events, her bitterness began to dominate her life to the extent that she became a virtual recluse. Earnest conversations with her vicar who urged her to forgive fell on deaf ears and compounded her resistance and she abandoned the practice of her faith. There was to be a happy issue out of her affliction when in a face-to-face meeting with her husband’s murderer Emily summoned up from the depths of her alienation the ability to offer a kind of forgiveness. The release for both these deeply troubled spirits was instantly manifest.

I don’t know whether it can be called a case of life imitating art, but television news featured an item about the Revd Julie Nicholson, vicar of a parish in Bristol who has announced her resignation. Julie’s daughter Jenny, a talented musician, was one of the victims of the London bombings on July 7. In the interview, Julie said that she was unable to forgive the man who planted the bomb, and that she daily pronounced his name, Mohammad Sidique Khan, as a reminder of his crime. “I rage that a human being could choose to take another human being’s life”, she said. “I rage that someone should do this in the name of a God. I find that utterly offensive”.

Julie finds it impossible to express forgiveness and says she will leave the matter of forgiveness in God’s hands in whatever follows this life. But her inability to express forgiveness this side of the grave has raised both spiritual and theological dilemmas for her. “It’s very difficult for me to stand behind an altar and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness when I feel very far from that”, she says. Her bishop defended her resignation from parish ministry saying that while Jesus indeed urged his followers to forgive their enemies, Jesus also had hard words for a religious establishment that exhibited hypocrisy and inauthenticity. “People want clergy to be honest rather than hide the truth”, he said as he questioned whether the road to holiness did not in fact imply “being more fully human and honest”.

Julie could be said to have demonstrated great integrity. For years there have been calls for clergy, including bishops, who claim no longer to believe literally in key doctrines of the Church like the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, to resign their ministries. But this phenomenon of religious doubt has not stopped such people from daily practising the fundamentals of Christianity which give high priority to forgiving one’s enemies, forgiving people their trespasses. This may suggest that in the last analysis Christianity is primarily about the practice of compassion and forgiveness than about orthodoxy of belief. One of the many factors in the decline of religious belief currently is the image the Church projects of being far more concerned about pursuing obscure theological arguments which appear to have no relevance to contemporary life, rather than embodying those practices of human compassion and care which materially address for example, the crisis of world poverty. In resigning her post as vicar, Julie prompts each of us to consider the extent to which, in a religious or indeed secular sense, we are practitioners of what we preach.

Television also this week also brought us a series of three programmes in which Archbishop Desmond Tutu, drawing on the practice of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, hosted meetings between victims and perpetrators of the endemic violence in Northern Ireland. While that sad part of the United Kingdom stands in dire need of a process of this kind, one of its tragedies is that it possesses neither the imagination nor the willpower exhibited by South Africa to initiate a process of forgiveness and reconciliation. Instead it takes an individual from a distant country and the vision of the BBC to create this kind of opportunity for people to communicate with one another. One of the insights that the programme gave me was of the complexity and moral ambiguity of some of these situations, as in the section where a grieving widow confronted her husband’s killer who reiterated an argument frequently heard at the Nuremberg trials, that he was a soldier in an army fighting for Ireland’s freedom, who followed orders to remove nominated targets. I retain as well the image of that widow recoiling from the gesture of reconciliation offered by the paramilitary and fleeing the studio. Above all I have an abiding image of the diminutive prelate treating all participants with compassion and acceptance, listening carefully to their stories and declaring how humbled he was by the whole experience.

Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist, wrote that in the Tutu programmes there appeared to be subtle pressure placed less on the perpetrators to show contrition than on the victims to exercise forgiveness. In Christianity of course both these responses are sought, but Freedland raises the question of the extent to which in contemporary society forgiveness is regarded as a psychological term which, through expressing feelings of empathy or even love towards somebody who has hurt you, one is enabled to move on.

In response, Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Oxford dismissed the idea of loving the person who has harmed you or your family as morally perverse. Feelings of loss and anger cannot coexist with love, he says. Such an understanding of forgiveness is nothing more than “cheap Christian rhetoric”. For Giles Fraser forgiving a person is to vow that you will not retaliate in kind, not take revenge. This is a position I elaborated fifteen years ago in my book Freedom, Justice and Christian Counter-Culture. In the violent milieu of the culture in which Jesus lived, where every act of violence then and largely still today calls for retaliation and vengeance, Jesus’s admonition to ‘turn the other cheek’ makes a radical break with the spiral of retaliatory violence. The foregoing of retaliation is also an act of empowerment as we witnessed in the positive outcomes of non-violence in achievements as different as those of Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the USA.

In the Coronation Street saga this is precisely what happened. Emily Bishop’s desire for revenge became her consuming passion and it was only when in a very dramatic scene she renounced revenge that she became free, and the gunman experienced forgiveness. They parted not as friends, nor with any commitment to ever meet again but as two human beings now able to live with themselves. I hope that the Revd Julie Nicholson watched that episode, and read Giles Fraser’s words in the paper, for both will help her appreciate that Christian forgiveness lies not in being forced to love the person who has wrecked your life, but in determining that you will never yourself retaliate to seek revenge or to respond violently towards another.