Thinking Anew:Twenty years ago Gordon Wilson lay in the rubble of the Enniskillen bomb tightly holding the hand of his daughter Marie as she died. Later that evening he gave an emotional account of her last words and then, to the astonishment of the world, he went on to forgive his daughter's killers and pleaded that there should be no revenge for her death.
"I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. I will pray for these men tonight and every night."
He was a modest, humble man, often describing himself as "only a draper from Enniskillen", but the world looking on saw someone and something much more significant. What they saw was not only a man with a deep Christian faith but one with the grace to forgive those who had so cruelly hurt him and his family. In that moment he underlined the unique characteristic of forgiveness, which is a willingness on the part of the aggrieved person, the victim, to accept personally the cost of the wrong or the harm done.
That is what makes it so difficult for so many to forgive: it seems unreasonable that those who have been maltreated by others should be expected to go that far. Instead they demand sympathy and justice; and who is to blame them? There were other victims of the Enniskillen bomb and similar atrocities, other decent people, who understandably could not respond like Gordon Wilson.
The South African author Laurens van der Post spent several years as a war prisoner of the Japanese. Writing of his experiences of that harsh regime he said: "It was amazing how often and how many of my men would confess to me after some. . .excess worse than usual, that for the first time in their lives they had realised. . .the dynamic power of the first of the crucifixion utterances: 'Forgive them for they know not what they do'." He saw forgiveness as a consequence of understanding rather than an expression of religious sentimentality. It was a liberating force within. He put forgiveness firmly in place as the very basis of a meaningful life.
It is not optional: it is an essential feature of personal development and growth. To harbour resentment and bitterness is to die a little. To forgive, however difficult, is to grow because it releases the energy required to nurse grudges and bitterness towards better ends.
In Christian teaching we are reminded that we all need forgiveness for, as St Paul tells us, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". Many will know what the apostle has in mind when he talks about doing the thing he hates and neglecting what is good. We are too easily inclined to think that our personal failings are not all that serious, thus fitting neatly into the character of the man in the Gospel who thanked God he wasn't as bad as the people around him. In our own minds we imagine a league of sinners with ourselves close to the bottom, not requiring forgiveness as others do. But every time we say the Lord's Prayer we are reminded that forgiveness of our sins is governed by our willingness to forgive those who have wronged us. Our deficiency in this regard, as a nation and as individuals, was a significant factor in the events that caused Gordon Wilson and countless others so much grief and loss.
The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr believed that forgiveness was the ultimate expression of love: "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."
GL