3 - The Dynamics of Forgiveness

Summary

The starting point for redemption is forgiveness, which is the space of possibility where we actualize new possibilities for people through meeting them as they are in themselves. We take forgiveness as our starting point of action (arche) rather than end (telos). Why? Because to repent (see Chapter 5) people need forgiveness first, with subsequent repentance reciprocated and reinforced (see Braithwaite, 2016; Fiddes, 2016 in relation to forgiveness and restorative justice). In Judaism the Hebrew word avon means both crime and punishment (von Kellenbach, 2013), with crime being harmful to both the victim and the offender. Within Judaism, the possibility of repentance is a basic human need, so much so that God created it before he created the world, as without it humanity could not exist (Ronel and Ben Yair, 2018).

Forgiveness is not a conditional formula, an operationalization: As Verdeja (2004: 26) states, ‘as forgiveness becomes instrumentalized, it is drained of its transformative power and simply becomes a tool in larger political and social projects. It ceases in other words to be a moral action in its own right when it is appended to broader moral or political ends’. Forgiveness opens the space of possibility and provides for a genuine encounter where there is no distinction between structures, agency and time (see Chapter 2). Forgiveness counters the negatively reinforcing failures of rehabilitation and enables a process of redemption that is a higher-order (non-reductionist and non-metaphysical) solution to problems perpetuated by the culturally determined problems of revenge. This desire for metaphysically justified revenge expressed as the need for satisfaction (see Chapter 4) is entropy and dissipation of the self. In the Cohen Brothers’ film of Cormac McCarthy’s (2005) novel No Country for Old Men, the Sheriff tells his father that the man who had shot him and left him in a wheelchair had died in prison, and wants to know what his father would have done if he had been released. The father replies ‘[n] othing’ and when the Sheriff expresses surprise, the father responds, ‘[a]ll the time you spend tryin’ to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin’ out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.’ This is not an expression of forgiveness, but an understanding that revenge will not change harms caused, or discover new and creative energy, but, rather, will dissipate what remains.