Why forgiveness???

BB and I were transfixed last night watching Compass. The program for the week was called Every Parent's Nightmare and was the story of Julie Nicholson, a mother and an Anglican priest who has to face the senseless death of her beloved daughter in the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Julie has struggled to make meaning of the tragedy of her daughter's death, and in the program she talked with parents of other children who had died in tragic circumstances: parents whose son was killed in fighting in Belfast, a father whose daughter was killed in the Tsunami in 2005 and mother whose son died of a brain tumour and who gave her son's organs to save the life of another mother's child, and a mother whose daughter has a debilitating motor neurological disease.

The program explored just how difficult it is to forgive when tragedy strikes. As a minister, it is one thing to extol others to forgiveness, but for many parents who suffer a tragic death of a child Julie it seems it is quite another to actually forgive.

Now, I've never managed to get pregnant, let alone have a child, so I can't pretend to understand what it must be like to lose a child. However, my own family was hit by tragedy in 1993 when my father was killed in a senseless motor racing accident. Yes, he chose to race his beloved MG - but those who raced at Phillip Island race track in those days put their faith in the hands of those responsible for track safety. And, in the case of my dad's death there was an enormous question mark over whether those responsible for track safety were even interested in taking responsibility for the upkeep of the track. He hit a tyre wall full of dirt, which no one even remembered was there. And what's more, those responsible hadn't even had a meeting to discuss his death after the fact - they didn't even consider it "significant."

Imagine how it felt for my mother, sister and myself to sit through a coroner's inquest where we had to listen to this. His death was not significant enough for them to even bother to discuss it. He wasn't famous. Easy to sweep under the carpet. At this point we were faced with a choice. Did we spend many years, enormous sums of money in order to sue these organisations to teach them a lesson? Or did we get on with living, with the things that had meant so much to my father, a keen Rotarian who always worked to make a difference for those around him.

For us the answer was not that complex. But it did involve forgiveness. We actually had to let go the anger we felt against those who had, to all intents and purposes been responsible for dad's death. We had to actively choose to move on. As one of the families in the compass program pointed out, forgiveness was an act they had to undertake over, and over again. But it was worth it. Why? Because it allowed us to get on with the business of living.

I've often thought that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness is much more about the forgiver than the one who is being forgiven. The "forgiver" is the one who is freed by the act of forgiveness. The forgiver is the one who gets their life back. To forgive is to choose life. Not to forget the person, or to glibly move on as if one is not suffering enormous pain, because that continues. But it is to choose to begin to heal, so that oneday, perhaps new life, resurrection even will be possible.

For me, that's the heart of the gospel, the point of the Jesus story.

Cheers,

SB