it’s going on 11 p.m.
It’s going on 11 pm, the end of our first day here – Angie and I just commented that we can’t believe it hasn’t even been 24 hours yet — mostly a day of setting our schedule for the week and taking Angie and Claire to some of the places I loved last year, my first visit here.. It was on that trip that I first learned a bit about the incredible story of forgiveness that followed Sierra Leone’s horrific war. It was what made me want to come back, what made me want to learn more from Sierra Leone, and from Africa, about this remarkable grace of forgiveness – how hard-fought it can be to attain it, how transforming it can be once it settles in the heart.
A few weeks ago, when we met for a brainstorming session in Maine with Libby, she asked each of us to ask ourselves what we love about this project, what questions we love, what we bring with us as we begin this work. I had no time to write before I left, but on the long plane flights here, I had many quiet hours to consider again what brings me to this work, and I will share a bit of it here. . .. I come to this beginning at the close of a period of upheaval in my own life, a years long effort to deal with a relationship quite close to my heart. It has been a time to learn about forgiveness, to choose to forgive. And I thought I had learned something about forgiveness, until earlier this year when I found I was still cloaked in sorrow over what had been. I thought forgiving, and continuing to love, was enough. But on a very lonely and gray February day, I realized that I had not truly forgiven anything. I found that deep within myself, I still wanted the person I thought I had forgiven to be accountable to me – to fix what had been broken, to do something to repair all that I had forgiven. And, of course, that is not forgiveness, because forgiveness comes without conditions, it does not define outcomes; it frees the other to find his or her own answers in the way that they must and will be found. On that morning, I found myself offering up a wordless asking to be forgiven myself – for the lurking pride and self-righteousness that made me think I knew anything at all about forgiveness, when in fact I’d only found a pale shadow of it. That was the day that the sorrow, which had lingered so long, began to leave. I found myself beginning to learn, just at the very beginning of learning, about the true grace of forgiveness – that which truly leaves all behind.
It is ridiculous to compare the challenges of my own life with what happened here in the war. I am not trying to do so, would not dream of it. But my own wrestlings with forgiveness and what it means, draw me towards a people who have had to deal with the aftermath of a war marked by unthinkable atrocities, towards a people who have in so many ways chosen paths of forgiveness and reconciliation. I want to learn from them. I have much to learn.