It was a Tuesday night in December that I shall never forget. I had been watching the late news on television, appalled at what I was seeing. People were crowded around a commuter train that had pulled into a station on Long Island, New York. A tragic scene had unfolded before them with dead and wounded people being taken off the train. Apparently, a man on the train had in his possession a 9-millimetre gun and a 15-round magazine, and he had suddenly opened fire, shooting people sitting peacefully as they rode home from work.

Senseless massacre
By the time his fury had ended the man, who was later identified as 35-year-old Colin Ferguson, had killed five people and injured another 20. It was a senseless massacre. Speaking to television interviewers, all of the bystanders expressed similar feelings – hate for the killer and a desire for revenge.

The scene stirred an enormous emotional reaction within me. Only four months earlier I had received the tragic news that my son John and his wife Nancy had also been killed by someone wielding a 9-millimetre gun. In the middle of the night, an intruder had stolen into their recently purchased home and senselessly murdered them. Still struggling with my own anger and devastation, I couldn't help but wonder if I would be filled with the same hate, if and when that phantom killer became a face and a person, that these people were expressing.

I didn't have to contemplate that question very long. For just then, as I was watching the Long Island Railroad massacre, my phone rang. It was the police. "1 have some news for you," the policeman said. "We caught the murderer of your son and daughter-in-law."

First year student
The news stunned me. The killer, he said, was the 18-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Clarke, the people from whom John and Nancy had bought their home only a few months earlier. His name was Joe "Shadow" Clark, a first year college student. They were led to "Shadow," the name he was known by, after he had told some fellow students that he had killed two people. The students reported this to the administrators, who then went to the police.

I kept interrupting the policeman, asking why this boy – whom he called "an honour student and a fundamentalist Christian" – had killed my children. The policeman didn't know. Shadow Clark never said why – not then nor since. As the case turned out, he received life imprisonment, with no chance of parole until he is 60 years old; but he had never revealed his motive for killing two beautiful people.

A bleak spot
Never has my faith been so challenged as it was on that December night. I was now in a new place, facing a raw confrontation with my soul. I think I screamed as I visualised Shadow Clark creeping up to their bedroom with that deadly gun. I shivered from the sense of evil that came with that image. I had been confronting the words of Jesus - that we must forgive those who do us harm ever since I had gotten the dreadful news. In the past I had always been able to forgive those who had hurt me. But this was different. This person had killed my son and daughter-in-law, searing me and my remaining five children with a pain that would endure forever. Now I knew his name and could see his face. Could I forgive him?

If I stayed true to my faith, I would have to say, "Father, forgive him, for he didn't know what he was doing." I would have to believe, as Jesus taught, that evil is overcome by good.

But in gut honesty - now that the question of forgiveness would never again be academic, distant, or simple - could I say, "Father, forgive the murderer of my beloved children?"

This was a most disturbing question, and for weeks it surged through my prison of anger, pain, desolate sadness, and beautiful memories of John and Nancy. It frightened me. The uncertainty of where I was and how to arrive at an answer put me in a bleak place. I wondered if I would become hardened by this brutal crime, even as I remembered the plea from the Old Testament, "Do not harden your hearts."

A sense of power
I began meeting with other victims of crime, asking them if they could forgive those who had hurt them so badly. Most of them couldn't get over the anger. In listening to them, I realised that they wanted to remain angry. Their anger made them feel powerful; it became their weapon against the criminal. Some expressed the fear that to forgive would indicate they were weak or had gone soft on criminals. Their anger was keeping them locked in hate, eroding them. That hate makes us feel powerful is evident even in the killings and the subsequent retaliations among the Serbs and the Muslims in Bosnia and the Arabs and the Jews in Israel. It is all so wrong, so contradictory to the message of Christ.

Somewhere, I read the story of the mother whose daughter had been killed by her husband. Her son-in-law was now in prison and had written to her, saying he had "found Christ." The mother, unable to forgive him, told her minister, in anguish, that the killer would go to heaven and be with her daughter, but she would go to hell because she could not forgive him. The devastation this woman had brought upon herself by not being able to forgive made me shudder.

As I struggled with my own personal loss, I began to see more and more what happens to people who can't let go of their pain. I didn't want to choose that fate. They were letting the past pollute their present, and they didn't even realize the psychological and spiritual damage it was causing them. Even as far back as the time of Confucius, the wise accepted that, as this great man put it, "to be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it."

We become what we hate
All too often we let hurts take root in us, crowding out our hearts. Society has taught us to value revenge, from the "cowboy and Indian" movies of our childhood to the constant wars to the current get tougher on crime mentality sweeping the country. Given our human nature, forgiving someone who has hurt us is one of the hardest things we are asked to do. We are drawn toward an "eye for an eye," because it makes us feel powerful. Therefore, forgiveness remains alien to us. We blind ourselves to the truth that, as Carl Jung said, "You always become the thing you fight the most." He wasn't the only one to underscore that we become what we hate.

This reality was clearly portrayed in a film released in early 1996 called An Eye for an Eye. Sally Field plays a mother whose daughter is raped and murdered. The system fails her by letting the murderer get off on a technicality. The mother, set on revenge, gets a gun and learns to shoot so she can kill the man. The producers of this film had one thing in mind – to push the hate buttons in all of us; and it worked. At the end of the movie, when the mother pumped bullets into the rapist, everybody hooted and hollered, clapping for the mother, who had now become a murderess herself.

Later, I saw Ms. Field in a guest appearance on the TV show Oprah. The hostess asked her if she had come to empathise with the mother. Ms. Field said no. The mother, she said, goes down into herself and touches the dark places there, the latent evil that could always haunt us. She sinks to become what the killer is. I admired Ms. Field for her insightful understanding of the evil of revenge, but I don't think the audience grasped it. They were force-fed the false power of “an eye for an eye”, and they cheered for violence.

Healing power of forgiveness
Not only people but nations become what they hate, says theology professor Walter Wink in his important book Engaging the Powers. He quotes George William Russell, author of Evil and World Order, who writes, "By intensity of hatred, nations create in themselves the characteristics they imagine in their enemies." And Professor Wink comments, "We want desperately to believe that our forcible retaliation to evil is like a projectile fired from a gun that will drop evil in its tracks. In fact, it is more like a ball thrown by a pitcher that will, as likely as not, cannon back at us."

Imagine, however, what the world would be like if all nations observed Christ's teaching to love their enemies. Then it would be love that is fired and love that would "cannon back at us." Love would radically transform our world, ending national and international conflicts fuelled by greed and the desire for power. Peace would reign. That is the message Pope John Paul II is trying to get across to leaders of the world's nations.

Sword of sorrow
I had long been praying that the sword of sorrow with which Shadow Clark had pierced me would not erode my soul with hatred or a desire for revenge, and the Lord was hearing my prayer. After seeing the Sally Field movie, I understood where forgiveness had to begin. We must turn the spotlight on ourselves to reveal who we really are when we become the victims of brutal evil or even of lesser crimes, such as assaults on our ego or any kind of abuse directed at us. I have seen people stay locked in their hurts that are the result of insults by family members, downsizing by an employer, lawsuits brought against them, and all sorts of other injustices, both perceived and real.

But I have also seen nobility shine in those who have suffered severe hurt or loss. Consider the rabbi who lost his family in the Holocaust. After he managed to get to America, he said he had forgiven Hitler. When a reporter asked him how he could forgive Hitler, who had done so much harm to him and others, the rabbi answered, “I forgave him – because I did not want to bring Hitler to America with me”.

I recognised the wisdom of his words, and I admired his ability to free himself from hate and conflict and turmoil. He underscored the human value of forgiveness and showed how holding on to anger, hate, and vengeance destroys any possibility of finding peace.

Then there is the Reverend Walter Everett, a Methodist minister who officiated at the wedding of Mike Carlucci, the man who had murdered the minister's son and whom the minister had visited in prison, hoping to find reconciliation and peace. “It blew me away,” Mr. Carlucci said.. “I had never had anyone forgive me in my life. I started crying. He said he wouldn't be able to live his life the way he lives it if he didn't honestly forgive me for this.” Reverend Everett told me that having forgiven Mike “doesn't remove the pain of Scott's death. But the additional pain of anger at Mike? I don't think I could have lived with that. By offering forgiveness, I freed myself from that hurt.”

I now clearly see the paradox: if we do not forgive others, we cannot heal; if we do forgive, then it is we, ourselves, who benefit the most.

A paradox
One day a reporter called and asked me how I felt about the murderer of my children. I instinctively
responded with the words "incredibly sad." That's when I realised I had begun to forgive. I was utterly saddened to think that an 18-yearold had destroyed three people, John, Nancy, and himself - and had permanently altered the lives of so many others. I began praying that Shadow Clark would respond to God's grace and be redeemed. I was learning that I had the power to forgive, and I refused to let an assassin erode who I am or to put a wedge between me and my God.

This didn't mean that my anger had gone away or that I didn't want the murderer severely punished. I would not be human if I retreated from the need to confront evil to overcome it. Justice - not revenge or the rejection of other human beings as worthless, unredeemable, or unloved by God - must be the final chapter in any tragedy.

Therein lies the greatest paradox of all – God loves both the one who is hurt and the one who does the hurting. That may be hard to understand, but it is true. Professor Wink beautifully explains it in Engaging Powers, "We are to love our enemies, says Jesus, because God does. God makes the 'sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous' (Mt 5:45) ...

"Jesus' laconic mention of God's all-inclusive parental care is thus charged with an unexpected consequence for human behaviour: we can love our enemies, because God does. If we wish to correspond to the central reality of the universe, we will behave as God behaves - and God embraces all, evenhandedly. This radical vision of God, already perceived by the Hebrew prophets ... is the basis for true human community."

Insidious doubt
Professor Wink adds this awesome note: "If, however, we believe that the God who loves us hates those whom we hate, we insert an insidious doubt into our own lives. Unconsciously, we know that a deity hostile toward others is potentially hostile to us as well. And we know, better than anyone, that there is plenty of cause for such hostility. If God did not send sun and rain on everyone equally, God would not only not love everyone, but love no one."

Those words have an incredible global implication. If we are ever to have peace in this world, we must change the long-established mind-set that makes people of one country the adversaries of another. We have to stop thinking of others as enemies and see them as our kin. Only then can we acknowledge that they are loved by God as we are and that we should all cherish one another.

Becoming our true selves
In an astounding book called The Non-Violent Coming of God, author James Douglas maintains that when Christ said "Love your enemies," it was not to give us "an impossible demand, but a way of saving us from our righteousness and from our self-destructive, world-destructive violence." Jesuit Father William Reiser, through the lens of theology, affirms that “the forgiveness of enemies represents the triumph of divine grace working in and through human nature, fashioning the soul so that it feels toward the world as God himself does”.

These passages reinforced what I had learned long ago, that the two words most often used by Jesus in his ministry were forgiveness and mercy. Jesus acknowledged that these are sometimes hard to practice, but he taught us by word and example that to follow him – to be a Christian – meant we have to be different. We have to give up a me-centred life in which ego reigns supreme and take on the true self the extremely difficult transformation of becoming a clone of the son of God. Central to the message of Jesus was that imitating him meant being in contradiction to the world, especially in embracing his fundamental teaching to "overcome evil with good"another way of saying "forgive."

Liberating experience
Fr Lawrence Jenco, the former Beirut hostage who suffered 19 months of torture and deprivation at the hands of his captors, called "forgiving and being forgiven... a liberating experience". In April 1995 at the US National Conference on Forgiveness, Father Jenco, who died this past June [1997], emphasised, "I do not forget the pain, the loneliness, the ache, the terrible injustice ... (but) when you can think of the hurt with feelings of gratitude, peace, and even joy, you know you are healed."

His beautiful message has been evident in the actions of many people who have forgiven those who have hurt them – and found a sweet freedom. Certainly, Pope John Paul II was truly acting Christ-like when he immediately forgave the man who tried to kill him more than a decade ago. Our Holy Father personally visited his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, in Rome's Rebibbia prison. The Pontiff extended his forgiveness to the whole family and even met with the mother and brother of this man in a private audience.

To forgive is divine
One of the most touching news stories I have ever read was that of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago forgiving the man who had falsely accused him of sexual abuse years earlier. I can't imagine how devastatingly painful it must have been for the Cardinal to have been so publicly humiliated by this vicious charge. Yet what an example he gave us when he sought a "meeting of reconciliation" to extend forgiveness to this troubled man, stating that he bore no ill will toward him. Moreover, he taught us that the pain he suffered not only contributed to his own spiritual growth but made him more compassionate.

When the story of his meeting with his accuser, Steven Cook, who later died of AIDS, was published, the Cardinal's own words were, "May this story of our meeting be a source of joy and grace to all who read it. May God be praised." Certainly, this paralleled what Jesus himself would have done and was a beautiful example of forgiveness for all of us.

To forgive is just what the word itself says – to offer a gift before it has been earned or even deserved. That is how God treats us; and that is why is is so difficult to forgive, because it is acting as God would. Forgiving does not mean to give in: it means to let go. Until we forgive, we remain emotionally handcuffed to the person – or to the nation that hurt us. And when we are handcuffed, we are not free, never at peace, never able to do God's work. The paradox of forgiveness is that it is a boomerang – the gift we send out is what we will get back.