Forgiveness and Reconciliation: A Path towards Transformation! Prof. Fr. Dr. Mathew Chandrankunnel CMI* Christmas is the time of coming together and exchanging gifts as a token of expressing joy and happiness. It symbolizes the gratuitous gift of God sending His own son to give love, peace and joy to the entire world! It is a gift which flowed out from the outpouring generosity of the loving God and not because in any way we deserve it. God decided to reconcile with humanity and the entire creation by personally sending His own only son and hence Christmas is the time of reconciliation, peace and happiness. I wish you all, the joy and happiness of Christmas. A few days ago I had the opportunity to be with His Holiness Dalai Lama. In his lecture he spoke to us about the necessity of forgiveness and reconciliation for one’s own peace and happiness. I have met him several times and had occasions to have closer contacts with him. In those times, His Holiness was personally sharing his feeling of fragility and vulnerability in practicing compassion at times. When he thinks of the aggression of the Chinese and how they are persecuting the simple Tibetans, emotions of anger and dread might evolve in him and as soon as he notices them, he will meditate and eliminate them as he feels that they are against the wisdom of Lord Buddha! By this attitude, His Holiness was pinpointing that such negative mindfulness is against compassion and one should never judge the Chinese in a harsh way! So to me, it is the height of forgiveness, reconciliation and compassion because the Chinese have usurped the land, wealth, freedom of the Tibetans who were the rightful owners of them and were chased out from their own country and still forcefully occupying the land in one pretext or other! Even to think against them who inflict pain and suffering, not only never to take up arms against them, but even considering arising emotions of anger against them as sinful, is indeed heroic practice of compassion and forgiveness! Only from the spiritual depth can a person practice such a life! Another example of such a life is Nelson Mandela. He is indeed made a remarkable life through his heroic forgiveness and reconciliation. He was confined to a small prison cell in the Robben Island for twenty seven years. He could have been burning himself with vengeance in the small sell because of the injustice inflicted upon him and his people. He took up arms against these people and they caught him and punished him. He was in a very small space, and this physically and mentally broke him. However, in the prison, he learned to widen his heart and horizon and turned towards non-violence preached by Mahatma Gandhi which was time- tested in India! Mandela had forgiven the wrongdoers and with a beautiful smile Mandela came out – with the smile of transformation! He could very well embrace W. Botha and the others who ran the apartheid Government and Mandela did not turn his Government machinery to take vengeance upon the apartheid Regime. He taught his fellow brethren to forgive and forget and make the next step towards meaningful life – transformation. Under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established and the wrongdoer and the wronged came together in tears to extract the truth of suffering and rose towards the siren heights of transformation. It is indeed a restorative justice where the perpetrators of violence and the victims of gross human rights
violations shared public hearings! The victims were forgiving the perpetrators and thus the perpetrators in turn achieve compassionate civil and criminal persecution. This is the way to salvation and Mandela and his people have shown us that this path could be taken by every culture and society! These types of heroic practice of forgiveness and reconciliation are being practiced all over the world, definitely as beacon light for us! In Ruanda after the genocide such a commission was established in turning hatred and anger towards love and reconciliation! Samandhar Singh of India, who stabbed Sister Rani Maria – a social revolutionary – 35 times, says that the family of the sister have given him total forgiveness and that transformed him towards a new life! In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition there is the life example of Milerepa. His uncle had done enormous wrongs against his family and out of vengeance Milarepa took to black Magic and killed the children of his uncle and many of the villagers who supported his uncle. He understood the amount of wrongs he had done and managed to move away from vengeance towards compassion and became a saint by practicing Dharma. Therefore, his paintings are being adorned in every Tibetan house and thus he is placed on the pedestal of sainthood. I am sure his example definitely influenced his Holiness Dalai Lama in fighting against the aggression of China. Christmas is the time of God’s reach out to humanity! Going beyond the reconciliation, God send His love as in the form of His own son and he taught us forgiveness on the cross by praying to the Father “Forgive them”. St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians write “In Christ God reconciled the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). The Greek word for reconciliation, καταλλάσσω., literally means “towards a transformation”. Thus Christ Jesus taught us what is love, forgiveness and reconciliation. The great theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar narrates the depth of reconciliation, forgiveness, Cross and Eros vividly in the following lines. “It is almost (or entirely impossible) to avoid the illusion that man knows from himself what love is, and how it is to be practiced. In truth, however, a sense for divine love first arises in man when he stands before God, in full readiness to allow himself to be led by Jesus Christ – in love – on the path of perfect renunciation and ultimately the Cross. A path of renunciation of, not love … but all hidden egotism in Eros and in the whole community of the family.” “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” philosopher David Whyte thus bridged forgiveness with maturity! Martha Nussbaum, another illustrious philosopher of our times, integrating all the emotions centred around violence and victimhood charters a moral choreography through her book ‘Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, and Justice’. She advocates to us to make a quantum leap to generosity and wider horizon of the transformative self through forgiveness and reconciliation, which can only give us peace and harmony, both for the individual and the society. I think this is the greatest message Christmas can send to us! * Director, Ecumenical Christian Centre, Whitefield, Bangalore, E-Mail: chandrankunnel@gmail.com
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