Since there are less and less events that I can claim to be too young to remember, I will take full advantage of this one: I am too young to remember the Vietnam war!!! But for those of you who did experience this important and culture-changing period as adults, you may remember a famous photo that captured the horrors of that war and brought it to the attention of an international audience. It showed a small girl running naked down the road with an expression of unimaginable terror, her clothes burned off, and her body scorched by napalm. The man who coordinated the raid on this child’s village in June 1971 was a 24-year old U.S. Army helicopter pilot and operations officer name John Plummer. The day after the raid, conducted by South Vietnamese airplanes, Plummer saw the photo in the military newspaper “Stars and Stripes” and was devastated. “It just knocked me to my knees and that was when I knew I could never talk about this,” he said. The guilt over the raid had become a lonely torment, one of the silent, devastating wounds of war that often go unnoticed. It speaks for the sensitivity, the integrity and character of this young soldier that this photo stuck in his conscience for years and decades. He suffered periodic nightmares that included the scene from the photo, accompanied by the sounds of children screaming.
The girl in the photo, Pham Thi Kim Phuc, survived 17 operations, eventually relocated to Toronto and became an occasional goodwill ambassador for UNESCO. In 1996 Plummer heard that Kim would be speaking at a Veterans’ Day observance in Washington, not far from his home. Pham spoke and at one point in her speech she said this: “If I could talk face-to-face with the pilot who dropped the bombs, I would tell him we could not change history, but we should try to do good things for the present.” Plummer, in the audience, immediately wrote a note. “I am that man,” he scribbled on paper and asked an officer to take it to her. At the end of the speech, he pushed through the crowd to reach her and soon they were face-to-face. “She just opened her arms to me,” Plummer recounted. “I fell into her arms sobbing.” All I could say is, “I’m so sorry, I’m just so sorry.” “It’s all right,” Kim responded. “I forgive. I forgive.”*
This story is of course a real-life illustration of Jesus’ command to forgive. It paints a rare best-case scenario: the person who brought unimaginable pain and hurt over another person says “I am sorry!” with true contrition and heartfelt emotion. And the person who was injured, heavily injured, offers unconditional and forthright forgiveness that leads to healing. Moreover, in this case it seems as if the perpetrator was perhaps as severely wounded as his victim by years of guilt – for an act that he was responsible for, but that was also to some extent controlled by other people. He was doing his duty as a soldier. It’s wonderful when these things can happen, even decades later, as in this case: both sides doing the absolute right thing. But surely, we must be aware that these best-case scenarios are rarities in life.
More often things are muddied, in the grey, layered and complicated. Forgiveness is often not straight forward. A person offers a sort-of apology, vague and non-committal, and doesn’t really mean it. Or the victim offers a perfunctory, “It’s all right.” Does she really mean it is all right now? Probably not! In other cases, perpetrators show no remorse and choose to live in a state of defiance, never offering a hint of empathy toward the victim – straightforward, but in the most negative way! Then there are many cases when both parties are to blame and often one party tries to navigate the burden away from him- or herself, attributing more of the responsibility to the other person. It’s called human nature. What do you do when people are mentally ill and simply can’t see what they have done? Or when the perpetrator has died? The truth is this: unfortunately, often forgiveness doesn’t go full circle, with both sides doing right by each other and the involved parties reaping the sweet award of pure emotional relief, making good, reconciliation in the true sense of the word. So, what do we do in the more muddied cases when we wait for someone to issue an apology in vain or when we simply can’t talk about stuff and are left to lick our wounds?
In all these cases, in all the shades of grey produced by hurtful human interaction, forgiveness is complicated and requires so much effort! Jesus’ command to forgive generously applies only indirectly. I mean, most of the time it’s not about how many times you forgive someone, but whether you can do it at all, right and do it right and be done with it! Instead, people do it half-heartedly or not at all and it lingers and lingers and stews in your heart, making you sick!
Still, we can learn something important from this biblical lesson, even for those many situations spoiled by the messy dysfunctions of human relationships. It’s clear that our Lord asked his disciples to put a lot of effort into the act of forgiving one another, to not give up, to avoid the trap of cynicism and hardened hearts. Because, the truth is, these personal grievances impact you just as much as the person you are waiting for and in many cases, they impact you significantly more. You have to learn to “let go,” for the sake of your own well-being. You may never be able to come full circle with that person in a way of true forgiveness and healing, although don’t rule it that out, ever. But in the meantime, learn to let go. Bring your burdens to the cross. Let Christ have it. It’s a choice you have.
The little monastery room where I stayed last week was dedicated to the memory of a woman named Joan Elaine Baker. She was apparently a great person, but not what you would call “a saint.” Many of the guest rooms at St. Augustine’s are dedicated to “ordinary” Christian people. On the wall, there was a brief description of her life and another framed paper with her favorite quotes and sayings. Almost all of them, incidentally, relate to our gospel lesson.
One said: “No one can hurt us without our cooperation. Other people’s actions don’t affect us, unless we choose to let them.” Let that sink in… Another one was by Robert Schuller. You may have heard it: “There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us – that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.”
Let us be of a forgiving mind, not naïve, but realistic and eager to give people a chance to reconcile whenever they are ready. If you are in a complicated situation with another person, one that chews you up, you may have to let this lesson play out in your mind seven times seventy times before you’re able to live with a liberated attitude. Yes, let Jesus’ command play in your mind seven times seventy times, and watch it become reality. And experience what was written in this quote in my monastery room: “No one can hurt you (in the long term) without your cooperation.” Amen.