Cover
story Forgiveness as peace process
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
NCR staff Coleraine, Ireland
Welcome to Northern Ireland!
announces a leaflet from the tourist office. Romantic countryside ... an
ancient land with a rich historical and cultural tradition and some of the
friendliest people anywhere.
Mother of Two Dies when Pipe-bomb Thrown Through the Window
of her Home by Loyalist Extremists, announces a newspaper in early June.
Her name was Elizabeth ONeill. She had lived in that house for 36 years,
in a Protestant area a stones throw from Drumcree, made notorious by
loyalist insistence on marching down Catholic streets to celebrate a battle
fought in distant 1690. The bomb landed at ONeills feet. She
grabbed it in desperate hope of throwing it back, but didnt get time.
Violence still stalks the romantic countryside. There and
everywhere, people still struggle, after all the thousands of years, for a way
to live together. Many who have known both war and peace have not judged peace
-- that ambiguous condition -- the best option.
There was peace of sorts in Northern Ireland for much of the
century but it was mired in such injustice that some form of revolt by the
Catholic minority became inevitable. Now there is talk of peace regained after
30 years of strife, but the Protestant majority is fearful of losing what it
long regarded as its heritage.
At one point or another nearly everything has been tried on this
complicated little island. The British army came in force. Delegations and
peaceniks came from America and elsewhere. Commissions and tribunals were
established. Bodies were formed to entice investment from abroad. The talk was
of community relations and development, no-nonsense practical approaches in a
hardheaded part of the world that had long ago grown cynical about
softness.
But now a new sound is heard in Northern Ireland. The word
forgiveness.
While it has been part of our vocabulary practically forever,
forgiveness has mostly been kept in a tight religious box. Thus, like
Chestertons problem with Christianity, it has not so much been found
wanting; it has rather been found difficult and left untried.
The word is being echoed, if only faintly, around the globe. An
alien sound in a law-and-order age, most people would say, but it is stirring
hope. A world weary of troubles, from brutal national predicaments to quiet
family desperation, from East Timor to these United States, seems eager to try
fresh solutions.
As May turned into June, Irish police dug frantically in search of
bodies disappeared in the early 1970s. The Irish Republican Army handed over
one such body and announced there were eight others. The saddest of these cases
was Jean McConville, a widow and mother of 10, abducted in front of her
screaming children in 1972 and executed because she had cradled in her arms a
British soldier fatally wounded on a Belfast street outside her house.
Forgiveness is a tall order in cases like these.
In Drumcree, on the outskirts of Portadown, one angle of what used
to be called Ulsters Murder Triangle, all is quiet on Sunday morning as
the respectable cars drive up to the local Protestant church. This is one of
the last redoubts of the Orange Order, the fraternity founded centuries ago to
protect Protestant interests, especially union with Britain. Many say the
annual Orange marching mania represents the dying kick of an old order passing.
Down those bleak streets, nationalist flags glare from their tall poles at
Unionist flags, and visitors are advised not to loiter taking pictures.
Farther north is Coleraine, a few miles from the legendary
Giants Causeway on the rugged northern coast. A polite Protestant little
town, it was the focus of major dissension a generation ago when the coveted
University of Ulster was located there in preference to Catholic Derry an
hours drive away.
Ed Cairns is a professor of psychology at the universitys
Centre for the Study of Conflict. A mild-mannered, scholarly type, he grew up
outside Belfast, has been at Coleraine since 1972. His initial academic
interest was childrens problem-solving. But in 1972 nearly 500 people
died in the local troubles, and Cairns couldnt ignore this.
Besides, he holds the view that too much emphasis has been placed on the
children: Adults have expected them to do the work the adults themselves
were not prepared to do. The parents were saying they couldnt be
friends with the other lot but encouraged the kids to do so.
The local conflict was not a popular academic area for a
psychologist. People in other disciplines such as history, politics and
economics dont think psychology has anything to say to this
subject, Cairns told NCR in a postmodern glass corner of the
university. The tide is turning, however, and he is now widely involved in
ethnopolitical studies, while, outside academia, the IRA and other military
groups have declared cease-fires, and the peace process is in the air.
Then Cairns heard the Templeton Foundation was offering grants for
studies of the potential role of forgiveness in conflict situations.
A fools pardon
He had been examining Northern
Ireland interactions in terms of groups rather than individuals. While there is
considerable contact between Protestant and Catholic individuals, this has not
changed intergroup attitudes, he explained. In a place where people boast that
they can tell in five seconds which group you belong to, Catholics see
Protestants they like as exceptions, and vice versa. Both Cairns and his
research assistant, Frances McLernon, are Protestant. McLernon tells of
Catholics in focus groups giving her what she called a fools
pardon for her misconceptions -- Sure, youre only a
Protestant.
Even people who have not been wronged feel strongly about their
group being wronged. This can lead, as it does in a local TV program,
Talkback, to what Cairns calls whataboutery -- each
side countering the others charges with but what about ...
?
That forgiveness is more than the whim of a Northern Ireland
academic with a heart is demonstrated by the scope of A Campaign for
Forgiveness Research, headquartered in Richmond, Va.
Everett L. Worthington Jr., professor of psychology at Virginia
Commonwealth University and an adviser to the Templeton Foundation, founded by
British-born industrialist Sir John Templeton, had long believed forgiveness
could combine science and spirituality to make a human difference. He sold the
idea to Templeton.
They advertised for research proposals and received 200 letters of
intent. While the very word Templeton has about it the odor of money,
making it liable to attract gold-diggers, Worthington found 138 responses
worthy of further development. They wound up with 58 projects. Templeton
contributed $4 million, and others added a million plus, but the project is
still only halfway to a goal of $10.6 million.
While much has been written about forgiveness, this is the first
major scientific assault on the subject. Ten criteria were used to determine
projects worthiness, notably scientific merit and the potential
fecundity of the research.
Yet this rigorous scholarly approach is tempered by the religious
aspirations of many of the principals. Im a very committed
Christian, Worthington told NCR in a phone interview, so I
was committed to the personal process of forgiveness throughout. Indeed,
his academic life seems to have tracked his personal life closely. My
research was about pain control when my wife was having children. ... As my
kids began to grow, I got into marriage and family dynamics and transmitting
values to adolescents.
When Worthington and one of his graduate students were counseling
a particularly acrimonious couple, he said to the student, What they need
is to forgive each other. So they designed an intervention.
It worked surprisingly well. They published the intervention, and
its popularity spread. He and a couple of other students, Michael E. McCullough
and Steven J. Sondage, published a book, To Forgive Is Human: How to Put
Your Past in the Past (InterVarsity Press, 1997).
This time Worthingtons personal life had an unintended
bearing on his work. A month after publication, his mother was murdered. He
wrote in Spirituality and Health (Winter 1999): The call came on
New Years Day, 1996. My brothers voice was shaky. I have some
bad news, he said. Mamas been murdered. ... Rage
bubbled up in me like lava. ... That night I fought the bedcovers, imagining
the scenes of violence, my thoughts overflowing with hatred and revenge. ...
Finally, my own book brought me up short.
He knew his research on forgiveness worked for others but had
never been forced to apply it to himself in any significant circumstances.
It helped me forgive, he said to NCR. It was a pivotal
event. It made me feel this is not just an academic thing. I can help people
and make an impact on their lives.
A Campaign for Forgiveness Research is a worldwide effort to
influence peoples lives. Some examples of the approved projects:
- Biological Effects of Forgiveness: Baseline & Stress
Response Correlates ... will examine whether forgiveness causes better
psychological and biological health.
- Religion and Well-being Among Black & White Adults: Does
Forgiveness Benefit Physical and Mental Health? ... will consider whether
health protective behavior, social support and religious consolation are other
ways in which religion is related to health.
- Forgiveness and AIDS: Accepting the Diagnosis, Assuaging the
Blame.
- Forgiveness at the End of Life.
- The Effects of Forgiveness on the Physical & Psychological
Development of Severely Traumatized Females.
- Truth and Forgiveness in South Africa: A Multidisciplinary
Approach.
- Betrayal, Forgiveness & Reconciliation in Close
Relationships.
- A Forgiveness Intervention Program with At-risk
Adolescents.
On average the 58 projects will cost about $200,000 each and take
from two to three years each. The money, always a good indicator, hints at the
amount of brain power being applied to what was so long an orphan area of human
endeavor.
But what is forgiveness?
From such a sea of scholarship it
may be difficult to retrieve forgiveness as we once knew it. Yet old-fashioned
forgiveness does shine forth, shines most brightly amid the most intense pain.
In Northern Ireland such cases are mentioned with awe. Let your hate be
buried with my boy, one father proclaimed at his murdered sons
funeral. Is there not a danger, then, of diminishing the heroic aspect of
forgiveness amid the more practical concerns many of the Templeton projects
outline?
Worthington quotes C.S. Lewis to the effect that we seldom quibble
at the promise of a heavenly reward for good done. A reward or desirable side
effect need not take away from the purity of ones forgiveness.
He compares two kinds of interventions. One is empathy-based:
getting people to forgive because this is a gift, a blessing they can give
another person. The second is a self-enhancement intervention. We
approach the person with the suggestion, This is something we can do for
you.
The empathy-based treatment takes longer to happen because there
is a greater distance to come around. With the self-enhancement
type of forgiveness intervention we find people get a smaller effect, but
they get a certain effect.
In all the academic talk its easy to lose sight of the
enormous act of will, or goodwill, required to forgive when it really counts,
that is, when the offense done to the forgiver is serious enough to be worth
studying in the first place. Its frequently about murder.
To Forgive Is Human offers this definition: Forgiveness is
an increase in our internal motivation to repair and maintain a relationship
after the relationship has been damaged by the hurtful actions of the other
person. The main point of the book is that forgiveness involves the whole
person, the authors note. Its between humans, notes Coleraines
McLernon. You cant forgive an animal or a hurricane. That
brings the process up close and personal. A solitary act, but also a very
intimate one.
The Coleraine study claims this forgiveness extends beyond the
individual to the group. The research began only last January, so its too
early to say what it will find. But the process suggests new vistas for human
relations on the bigger scale.
Robert Enright, a leader in the field of forgiveness research
(NCR, May 30, 1997), is invoked by Cairns to the effect that, for
lasting solutions to human conflict, justice is not enough: There has to
be forgiveness. On the other hand, forgiveness comes more easily if
justice is seen to be done. In Northern Ireland the early release of prisoners
guilty of terrible crimes made people more reluctant to forgive them. While
admiring the reconciliation process in South Africa, Cairns has the same
problem about those who must pay no price, least of all repentance, other than
to publicly confess their crimes.
In Northern Ireland, many refuse to forgive the other
side because that would almost condone what was done. That,
in turn, would seem to imply the victims deserved what happened to them.
A constant stumbling block is that each group has long dehumanized
the other, and forgiveness involves raising the wrongdoer back to the status of
a human being. A woman in one focus group said she would kick a British soldier
if he were dying at her feet. She acknowledged he felt the pain,
explained McLernon, but was not prepared to give him back his human
status because she herself had been dehumanized, not necessarily by him
individually but by his group, the British army.
Attitudes written in stone
In the Northern Ireland focus
groups, few if any have been won away from their mostly steadfast positions. It
is no surprise to the Coleraine team that attitudes on both sides are mostly
written in stone. Yet Cairns is confident the undertaking is relevant:
You have to start somewhere. Information is being compiled on which
future efforts at forgiveness could be built -- the Cairns project, like the
other Templeton efforts, is not a crusade to change the world but a study to
cast some light on it.
In the current atmosphere of tentative peace many new ideas are in
orbit. There is more immediate emphasis on finding ways to remember than to
forgive. A victims commission has been set up. A replica of
Washingtons Vietnam Wall has visited Belfast. Some say Northern Ireland
should have one of its own. Others say they wouldnt want the names of
dear ones on the same wall with the other group.
All conflicts have a tendency to fade away for a while, but they
eventually return, says Cairns. The former Yugoslavia is a classic case.
We must find a way to solve these with some degree of permanency,
he goes on. He has forgiveness in mind.
Various straws in the wind indicate forgiveness is an idea whose
time has come. It began, says Worthington, around 1989, when communism began to
fall and a generation of former enemies suddenly had to learn how to live
together by other means than atop military hardware. The century had
demonstrated that one half of the world hating and mistrusting the other
hadnt worked. Similarly, Nelson Mandela came to power in 1992 and
instituted the highly acclaimed Truth and Reconciliation Commission to come to
terms with an old, ruthless enemy. The social climate is making it necessary
for whole cultures to deal with people who have harmed them historically. It is
within this bigger picture that group forgiveness becomes important.
Theres also the Internet and the whole electronic
revolution, continues Worthington. As traditional human bonds are
replaced by new electronic bonds, people are saying, Theres
something important about human relations that Ive got to hold on
to. Authentic relationships have consequences.
This rethinking seems to be provoking another look at
spirituality, Worthington says. And all the above may in turn be influenced by
the trembling or thrilling prospects a new century and millennium bring.
But is all this not asking too much of forgiveness?
Worthington, anchored in his basic beliefs, is undaunted. The
world through which Jesus chose to enter history was a harsh one, yet he relied
on forgiveness and made an impact, as did the early saints, he says.
Forgiveness is not a panacea, he agrees.
Its part of the cooperative venture of different religions and
people. Its OK to ask a lot of it.
National Catholic Reporter, July 16,
1999
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