Reflection on Forgiveness

The first time I traveled without my family was a summer study abroad in college to Rwanda. And much like many of my endeavors, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We were there to study the genocide that happened in 1994, to walk the dirt paths where blood was spilled, to meet Rwandans whose families were murdered by machete in front of them by their neighbors, to meet those neighbors who did those unspeakable acts.

I remember one day hanging out with my classmates eating pizza in a café. We were laughing and joking and taking pictures of each other. Someone mentions how no one besides us would understand our jokes and the mood instantly changes. Because we all know that while no one will be able to understand our jokes, no one will be able to understand our experience at all—the funny, the difficult, the horrifying, the beautiful.

A wave of silence passes over the table—we all know what we are all thinking—the churches we visited the day before. The churches where Tutsi fled for refuge, believing their attackers would not commit murder in a sacred place of God. Instead, the priests sought out the killers and together they slaughtered everyone in the church—on alters, pews, the lawn, everywhere. The experience of even just witnessing the place years later is impossible to describe—like when you take a picture of a beautiful landscape but when you print it doesn’t fully reflect what you saw. The colors are less intense, the particular way the sunlight shines in the sky isn’t shown and the overall feeling of the experience is lost. I don’t often talk or write about these experiences because I don’t have the right words, but neither does anyone else.

I spoke at length with a priest who has a church in Kigali for survivors. We talked forever about me. About my life, what I was doing in Rwanda, about MY anger and MY frustrations about what happened in his country, about why this could have ever happened and how on earth his country could ever heal. 

He pauses. Then he begins to tell me how his wife and daughters and nephews were killed in front of him, how he only survived by hiding in a closet for three days.  He says what kept him alive was praying to God, and finding chocolates on the top shelf of the closet—which he knew were sent by God—kinda like chocolate manna.  When he was in the midst of losing everything, God was still there. He was never alone.

His congregation—mostly women—have similar and sometimes even more horrifying stories. Stories of being raped with broken glass soda bottles-or by men who knew they were infected with HIV, stories of lost children and husbands, stories of streets filled with blood and dogs running around with human limbs in their mouths. The trauma and the horror is undeniable.

I asked him what his views on forgiveness are. After another long pause, he explains that forgiveness can be part of the healing process, but that it can take a long time. That he forgives the people who did this because it was the Devil inside them—the sin and evil inside them does not mean that there is not God and good inside them too. He said, “Because God forgives me for the sins I commit, I therefore must forgive others for the sins committed against me. I still weep for my family every day. But I forgive because I must and I’m not angry anymore.”

I didn’t understand that day what he meant. It felt simplistic and foolish. You forgive because you must? 

Why?

Because some religion which was complicit in the murder of your family says that God says you have to forgive them? What happened to the God that will smite my enemies? Sometimes, I think that God would be a good one to have around.

Even to this day I am only beginning to understand—that yes, forgiveness in some ways is simple, but surely never foolish. “I forgive because I must” he said.

And I think what he meant was that I forgive for my own humanity. I forgive because there is no other way to continue going without letting go. I forgive because I must.

My story does not end with a happy anecdote about how a Tutsi survivor and Hutu perpetrator come together, understand their differences, forgive and are forgiven, and now live in harmony as neighbors.  Although I did meet people who lived in a “reconciliation village,” that is not my story.  The forgiveness I witnessed was the healing process of the individual—how personal reflection with their own spirituality and community of other victims created a loving place for pain and anger to be expressed, to be witnessed to, and to be let go. To wake up each day and choose to live without anger.

For a long time after I returned home, I was frustrated with myself about the pain in my own life—because it felt so insignificant in comparison to what Rwandans had experienced. How can I allow myself to be upset when my roommate destroys our kitchen when people’s families were murdered? How can I be up at night crying because a friend hurts me when women were raped and infected with HIV? Why do I struggle with forgiveness when Pastor Richard is able to?

A part of me begs to cling to the hurt in my life. I hate everything that is wrong in my life and in others. I hate my own weaknesses and flaws and I’m frustrated and hurt by the flaws in others. When I let the pain control me, I become angry.

I am comforted by the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu who said, “To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human. You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: the depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.”

The depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.

I know the hurt in the world, particularly in Rwanda, is certainly far greater than anything I have faced in my own sheltered and privileged life.  I have not felt the sharpness of the pain inflected with the machete. I have not traveled to the depths of evil from which rises the anger to take another’s life.

What happened in Rwanda—and Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and Armenia, and South Africa, and Indonesia, and throughout the world and history—is beyond human understanding.  And the fact that people everyday choose to forgive is also beyond human understanding. But each day, both happen—even for us, albeit not in a violent or characteristically evil way.

Henri J.M. Nouwn wrote, “Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour, increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”