Forgiving Your Killer (or lesser things)
To me this is simply another plane of spirituality, and specifically Christian spirituality...
Some time ago, I was approaching the opportunity to forgive someone who had done me a great wrong, with great consequences in my life for a long long season and still. This person had done their work, they’d pondered in depth and breadth their offense, had owned it, articulated it, and had requested a face-to-face meeting to be able to apologize in person. For my part, what I knew was a lot to forgive and what would come to be revealed meant there was more to forgive.
My desire was to be like Jesus, actually, he who said to everyone involved in his passion and crucifixion, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”. My desire and intent was to freely offer forgiveness and grace asking nothing in return. I wanted to offer full-on grace and offer the experience of full-on grace, and be like Jesus. The only problem was my hurt, and the competing desire for vindication, in short, my self.
I prayed a lot going into the meeting, reflecting both on Jesus’ passion and the reality and power of the resurrection, a power that changes everything. In confessing to Jesus that my best self wanted to do one thing but I didn’t know if I could actually do it, his words to me were, “Use your will.”
I also needed the help of a man who’s inspired me many times in the past, Father Christian de Cherge, one of the seven martyred Trappist monks of Tibhirine in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria in 1996. Their story is immortalized in the Oscar-nominated movie Of God’s and Men, a much shorter (5 minute) version is here:
As civil war continued to rage and increase around their monastery, these men decided to stay and continue to do what they’d done for years and decades, loved the community around them, predominantly Muslim. And death found them, at the hands of Islamic terrorists who kidnapped them, held them for two months, and then beheaded them.
Quite a few months before he was abducted, Father Christian had written a letter to be read in case the worst happened (it did). The Last Testament by Christian de Cherge is worth reading slowly, and in full. For years, and every year in our Coracle Fellows program, I’ve quoted snippets from it, so moving it is. In it, he pre-forgives the one who would execute him, and addresses him as a friend and fellow pilgrim towards God.
And you also, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you were doing. Yes, for you also I wish this “thank you”—and this adieu—to commend you to the God whose face I see in yours.
And may we find each other, happy “good thieves,” in Paradise, if it pleases God, the Father of us both. Amen.
In that same letter he expresses his hope that, before his killing, he might have a few moments to pray, seek forgiveness, and forgive.
I should like, when the time comes, to have a clear space which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of all my fellow human beings, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
Friends, to me this is simply another plane of spirituality, and specifically Christian spirituality. Since I’ve first encountered Father Christian’s story, I’ve been arrested by it and the question, “How does a person get formed so that they can be like that when something like that happens?”
Years later after that first encounter, the answer is embedded earlier in the letter.
I hadn’t read the full letter for a long time. I usually just quote from it the phrases that are in my speaker notes I’ve used each year.
Going into this meeting where I’d be offered the opportunity to forgive a great hurt, I thought it’d be good to not only read those select sentences but also re-read the whole thing. In doing that I found how it was that Father Christian was able to actually forgive, even the man who would slit his throat while it was happening.
Father Christian knew God. He had spent his life pursuing union with God such that he could be able to see as God sees, actually, not just imperfectly as we are limited too on this side. He’s responding to those who warned him of potential death, and now maybe felt justified in their warnings.
But these people must realize that my most avid curiosity will then be satisfied. This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—immerse my gaze in that of the Father, to contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of his Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and to refashion the likeness, delighting in the differences.
Wow. What Father Christian is saying is that his murderer will merely expedite that which he’d been longing for and already spent his life pursuing…union with God, and being able to see with the eyes of God across all of humanity, to see people as God sees people.
I was inspired by this, going into my meeting, strengthened not just by Father Christian’s example but also by his mindset and worldview.
Read the whole letter, slowly, carefully, and prayerfully. It beckons us to another way of being. Ask for the grace to let your own life arc in the direction of that Christ-likeness, even if you or I will not likely have the opportunity to offer own lives as that clear a witness to the self-sacrifice love of the God-Who-Is who became flesh in Jesus Christ.
What happened in the meeting with my friend is not to be told here, but suffice it to say that Grace entered into the room for both of us, and it was not of my own doing.