Dear Friends of Core Virtues,
 
As a reminder, we are continuing to highlight book recommendations, heroes, and blog stories from years past while I am on maternity leave. Read on to see some reflections by Mary Beth Klee about the difficulty and nobility of heroic acts of forgiveness. 
 
Sincerely,
Gabrielle Lewis
Core Virtues Director
 
4/1/19: “Forgiveness,” by Mary Beth Klee
 
Forgiveness is a beautiful idea – until you have something to forgive.”
C. S. Lewis

April fifteenth would be Corrie ten Boom's (1892-1983) one-hundred-thirty-third birthday.  She had something to forgive. During World War II, the middle-aged Dutch watchmaker was imprisoned at Ravensbruck concentration camp. Corrie was not Jewish, but for nearly two years, she and her family had hidden Jewish refugees from Nazi occupiers. When the ten Booms were betrayed by a Dutch informant, the S.S. carted the family off to prison, where, shortly thereafter, her father died. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to the horrific Ravensbruck camp for women, where sadistic guards, starvation, disease, and slave labor, were a part of daily life.  Betsie, abused and mocked by guards, died in the camp. In December 1944, Corrie was released as the result of a clerical error. Buoyed by her faith, Corrie ten Boom spent the rest of her life reflecting on and writing about the meaning of her experiences, and speaking about the importance of forgiveness.
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Corrie ten Boom’s particular push-come-to-shove moment came in 1947, when after addressing a Munich audience on forgiveness, she was approached by a former Ravensbruck prison guard.  With horror, she recognized the guard who’d taunted and mocked her naked sister, as she was forced into the showers.  He had "found Jesus," and was, she wrote, “beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,’ he said…his hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people … the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me...I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not…I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness.  As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.”  Corrie spent the remaining thirty-five years of her life putting that love into practice, establishing in the former Darmstadt concentration camp a flower-filled, cheerfully painted place of renewal and rehabilitation for ex-prisoners and victims of war. Her 1971 book The Hiding Place and the 1975 film by the same name made her story known to a generation of readers and viewers.

Forgiveness on that level (like mercy) seems super-human and is often inspired by faith. Yet, it has been preached and practiced by pragmatic, not particularly religious people, like South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. He also had something to forgive.  Actively resisting his country’s unjust apartheid regime, he organized armed struggle against the government and was jailed. Mandela spent twenty-seven years as a prisoner, often in solitary confinement, and endured torture and abuse. Yet he also had time to reflect and come to know his enemy.  When he was released, four years later becoming South Africa’s first black president, his principles were generosity of spirit and reconciliation; his politics were those of forgiveness. “I do not forget,” he said, “but I forgive... Forgiveness liberates the soul. It removes fear. That is why it is such a powerful weapon.” 

"We must strive to be moved by a generosity of spirit that will enable us to outgrow the hatred and conflicts of the past," the new president emphasized. The 2009 movie “Invictus” memorialized Mandela's first year as president, when in 1995 he threw his vigorous support behind South Africa’s mainly white Afrikaner rugby team, formerly a symbol of the hated apartheid regime. He urged them on to victory in the World Cup—an event that ended up uniting 43 million of his countrymen, fostering reconciliation and forgiveness.

Many contemporary psychologists emphasize forgiveness as a means of healing from a grave transgression – a coworker who has undermined you, a spouse who has betrayed you, a colleague who ensured your ouster, a “friend” who let his candid assessment of you poison a new relationship. Psychologists distinguish between forgiveness (desirable) and reconciliation (not always possible or desirable). The latter involves a restored relationship with the transgressor: the spouses, for example, are reconciled. Forgiveness, however, involves a psychological and emotional pivot that allows the person wronged to view the wrongdoer with compassion, kindness, and even to wish them well.  Forgiveness, in other words, is a shift and a gift. 

Psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman define forgiveness as “an unconditional gift given to transgressors based on the belief in the innate value of all persons.” The person who practices forgiveness does not excuse the transgression, does not say “what you did is OK.”  But he or she is able to let go of hurt, move beyond a desire for retribution, and toward an attitude first of forbearance and then of love.  

That is very hard.  Divine even.  One thinks, of course, of the font of Corrie ten Boom’s deep faith:  Jesus on the cross, forgiving his crucifiers: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  Those words, which millions of believers will remember in a special way this month, have inspired and challenged generations of Christians. 

Nor are Christians alone in preaching forgiveness.  Judaism teaches that God forgives people their sins, and commands them to forgive their transgressors.  Islam refers to God as “Al-Ghafoor,” the Forgiving One, and encourages forgiveness in order to receive forgiveness from Allah.  Buddhism and Hinduism enshrine the concepts of compassion and forbearance to encourage relinquishing one’s resentment towards the transgressor.

What difference does it make?  All the difference in the world.  We all know people who have endured the same horrible experience, but have reacted in very different ways:  one with bitterness and contempt, another with kindness and determination; one with resentment, another with forbearance; one with toxic rage, another with forgiving love.  Which serves us better?  Which is more attractive?  Which is more liberating - for ourselves, our children, and our future?

Corrie ten Boom made her choice.  "Forgiveness is setting the prisoner free, only to find out the prisoner was me," she wrote. The greatest gift of forgiveness is for the giver. Corrie ten Boom was born and also died on April 15.  It’s a good month to think about forgiveness.

Mary Beth Klee

Dear Friends of Core Virtues,
 
As a reminder, we are continuing to highlight book recommendations, heroes, and blog stories from years past while I am on maternity leave. Read on to see some reflections by Mary Beth Klee about the difficulties of cultivating true compassion and mercy. 
 
Sincerely,
Gabrielle Lewis
Core Virtues Director
 
3/1/2019: “The Quality of Mercy” by Mary Beth Klee
 
“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…”
- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
 
That’s true:  the quality of mercy is not strained, and droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.  It always feels that way to the recipient of mercy, anyway.  We perceive mercy as an unmerited gift from above, and we tend to see the heroically merciful (Buddha, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa) as superhuman:  mild, meek, beyond anger, and detached from the things of this world.  Maybe that’s the reason “mercy” is so hard to cultivate.  We know we should be merciful, but who actually wants to be meek and mild, passionless and detached?   
 
Yet the heroes and heroines who are featured here during this month of March—those who showed compassion to the wrongdoer or the weak—are anything but mild, aloof and remote individuals.  They are technicolor human beings with passions, energetically engaged in the world, and specifically engaged in service to those in need.
 
Consider Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, whose trailblazing service in the Civil War earned her the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield.” In the carnage of that conflict, she saw her countrymen needlessly dying on the battlefield, and she fought to bring mercy.  She battled back many bureaucratic obstacles to minister as a nurse on the scene. She then went on to found the American Red Cross, the agency that serves victims of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. 
 
Or think about Barton’s contemporary, Henry Bergh, whose patrician upbringing freed him from the need to earn a living through his work.  In his fifties, Bergh was so moved by the plight of cruelly treated animals (and most animals were cruelly treated in the mid-nineteenth century; read the eye-opening book and see how) that he urged new laws to prevent such abuse, filed more than twelve-thousand unpopular court cases, and founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to carry on his life’s work of “humane” treatment for animals.  Bergh was an infamous showman (he might spring from a perch on a roof into a ring of fighting cocks or dogs to make his point), but he made mercy his lodestar and moved the needle.
 
Or look at another late nineteenth great:  Jane Addams, who put her full energies and intellect into the formation of Hull House, a community center to assist and educate Chicago’s impoverished immigrant community.  The classes she offered there (in domestic arts, the trades, and English) allowed many newly arrived immigrants to find solid footing in their new home, and provided a model nationwide.
 
Mercy differs from compassion and is harder.  It is compassion extended to an enemy, a wrong-doer, those to whom we have no “obligation,” and those in our power. Our Core Virtues mercy poster features voracious cheetahs letting a trapped baby wildebeest live.  It looks like the lady cheetahs are saying: “Where’s your mother, honey?”  Mercy, in other words, is completely counter-intuitive.   
 
Modern day heroes of mercy?  Consider St. Louis-based Charles Clark and Morris Shenker.  In 1959 Jesuit priest, Father Charles “Dismas” Clark sought a way to help ex-cons start a productive life that would prevent them from returning to jail.  He knew that housing was a major difficulty for many newly released offenders:  those who had no place to stay often returned to crime on the streets. With the assistance of Jewish criminal lawyer and financier, Morrie Shenker, he founded Dismas House in St. Louis, the first half-way house for ex-offenders.  It offered not just shelter, but meals, vocational training and counseling for residents.  It became the inspiration for the 1961 film The Hoodlum Priest, and today there are hundreds of Dismas Houses throughout the United States. (Dismas was the Good Thief in the story of the Crucifixion.)
 
Do we want children to show mercy?  Of course.  Children are often fruitfully charged with the task of feeding or cleaning up after the family/classroom pet or caring for a baby sister or brother. Such responsibilities promote concern for those less capable than themselves, and may prompt them to show mercy in their own way, for example, donating some of their hard-earned savings to a good cause.  But in schools, we should not give children the impression that mercy might mean compassionately tolerating someone who abuses or hurts them. That’s not mercy.  That’s criminal negligence.
 
How do we mere mortal grown-ups show mercy on a daily basis?  Who’s in our power?  Consider not just our spouses, co-workers, children and pets, but the telemarketer who phones at the dinner hour.  Or the store clerk, who really had no part in the faulty item we purchased at an inflated price. Or the clueless driver ahead of me, still paused at the traffic light that turned green thirty seconds ago.  How we react—is a measure of our mercy. 
 
And it’s not easy. Mercy may fall upon the recipient as a “gentle rain from Heaven,” but the one who extends it must cultivate hard-won traits of self-control, openness to others, and even courage.  It’s not about “always being nice” and “always giving” to those in need.  It’s about actually meeting needs, and helping supposed enemies, wrongdoers, and “those in our power” to ultimately flourish.