Beyond Forgiveness E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

"If we harbor thoughts of violence or hatred, or seek revenge or retribution, we are contributing to the wounding of the world; if we transform those thoughts into forgiveness and compassion, and then move beyond them to actually make amends or restitution, we are contributing to the healing of the world. This timely, powerful and compassionate book helps show us the way." --Deepak Chopra "Nothing will help us survive the present age more than breaking the tragic cycles of violence and revenge that threaten our very existence. To do so, we must honor our soul's desire for deeper forms of reconciliation, a process that Phil Cousineau reveals here as being on the other side of forgiveness, in the ancient ritual of atonement. His book is a profoundly important contribution to the healing of the world, and I give it my blessing." --Robert A. Johnson, author of Transformation, Inner Work and Owning Your Own Shadow As indispensable as forgiveness has been to the healing process throughout history, there is another equally profound action that is needed for ultimate reconciliation, which Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, calls "the other side of the coin." Turning over the coin of forgiveness, we discover atonement, the half-hidden, much-overlooked other half of the reconciliation process. Beyond Forgiveness shows how acts of atonement--making amends, providing restitution, restoring balance--can relieve us of the pain of the past and give us a hopeful future. This rich and powerful book includes 15 thoughtful contributions by high-profile thinkers and activists including Huston Smith, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Azim Khamisa, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Jacob Needleman, Michael Nagler, Diane Hennacy Powell, James O'Dea, Arun Gandhi, Kate Dahlstedt, Ed Tick, Richard J. Meyer, Rev. Heng Sure, Douglas George-Kanentiio and Katharine Dever. Atonement is put forward as a process that we must all learn to practice--from individuals to nations--if we are to heal our wounds and move forward.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword: Atonement as a Spiritual Path

Preface: The Next Step in Forgiveness and Healing

Introduction: The Revival of an Ancient Awareness

Part One: Forgiveness and Beyond

Chapter 1: Forgiveness as Spiritual Liberation

Forgiveness as Practice

At-One-Ment

The Giving Within For-Give-Ness

Collective Forgiveness, Collective Atonement

On the Journey

The Real Work

The Long View

The Death of the Ego

The Moment of Moments

The Roots of Atonement

Soul Force

Forgiveness in Our Communities

The Spiritual Challenge

Chapter 2: The Wisdom of Atonement

Repairing the Past

If Atonement Is Rejected

The Question of Remorse

The Privilege of Repairing the Past

Atonement as Awakening

The Gift

Remorse in an Implacable World

The Gift of Atonement

Chapter 3: We Can Work It Out

Collective Atonement

Four Principles of Atonement

What Is to Be Done?

Conclusion

Chapter 4: At-One-Ment

The Growing Need for Atonement

The Power of Compassion

Zen and the Art of Atonement

A Story of Atonement

Chapter 5: Burying the Stone

Traditional Atonement Ceremonies

Rites of Atonement

Chapter 6: Taking the Crucial Step

From Apologies to Atonement in Australia

Amazonian Atonement

Beyond Healing to Reparations in Ecuador

Beyond the Cycles of Abuse

Chapter 7: A Twelve-Step Approach to Atonement

Part Two: Stories of Atonement

Chapter 8: Memories of My Grandfather

Chapter 9: Healing the Wounds of War

Transformations of Oneness and Intimacy During Warfare

Atonement After the Viet Nam War

Atonement with History and Truth

Conclusion: Atonement with the Cosmos

Chapter 10: After the Death of My Son

The Journey of Reconciliation

Three Steps

My Own Atonement

Tony’s Atonement

Starting with Empathy

The Journey of Atonement

Atonement as Restorative Justice

Chapter 11: Ten Days of Atonement

The Process

The Teshuva Tradition

Repentance and Atonement

Atonement Is a Spiritual Practice

Collective Atonement

Rectifying the Past

Chapter 12: The Iroquois Great Law of Peace

The Iroquois Justice System

Healing Words

The Condolences

Peace Thinking, Peace Acting

Atonement in the Confederacy

Chapter 13: Talkin’ ’bout My Generation

Soul Force

Finding Unity

Atonement in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 14: Buddhist Bowing and Atonement

Conclusion: Creative Atonement in a Time of Peril

The Contributors

The Editor

The Beyond Forgiveness Project

Acknowledgments

More praise for Beyond Forgiveness

“Stay with it, and let this book open your heart, that best of all changings. Hard work, no question, but so worth it. The good and brave stories being told here—like the monk’s tears on the head of the sullen teenager (that open this book), like James O’Dea’s tears in the metro reading Thomas Merton (that close it)—will give you courage, heat for the leap, the phone call, the meltdown.”

—Coleman Barks, author of Rumi: The Big Red Book and The Essential Rumi

“You cannot read this book without taking up a spiritual challenge; the challenge is to see even the most painful of the wrongs that are done to us in a larger, more transparent, and perennial context. This book is full of stories of spiritual courage and a transcendence that passes all cultural and religious boundaries, to show us the universality of what is truly spiritual about humanity. Phil Cousineau has a remarkable instinct for topics that pulse with the painful yet vital spiritual heartbeat of our time.”

—Stephen Larsen, Ph.D., author of The Fundamentalist Mind: How Polarized Thinking Imperils Us All and coauthor of A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell

“If we harbor thoughts of violence or hatred, or seek revenge or retribution, we are contributing to the wounding of the world; if we transform those thoughts into forgiveness and compassion, and then move beyond them to actually make amends or restitution, we are contributing to the healing of the world. This timely, powerful and compassionate book by Phil Cousineau helps show us the way.”

—Deepak Chopra, author of The Book of Secrets and The Path to Love

“Nothing will help us survive the present age more than the realization that we must break the cycles of violence, when our souls long for healing, forgiveness often proves to be an inadequate solution to the soul’s desire for longer lasting reconciliation. I’ve long believed another step is required for our transformation, one that Phil Cousineau reveals here as being on the other side of forgiveness, in the ancient ritual of atonement. I believe this book is the vital next step in the making of a strong modern myth of deep reconciliation. It is a profoundly important book and I give it my blessing.”

—Robert A. Johnson, author of He, She, Transformation, and A Slender Thread

“Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement is an inspiring, practical, and compelling book, relevant for our times. Cousineau provides a profound and provocative book that has us ponder where we might need to forgive ourselves and others; and to look at atonement and what it ignites in the human spirit.”

—Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., author of The Second Half of Life

BOOKS BY PHIL COUSINEAU

The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, 1990

Deadlines: A Rhapsody on a Theme of Famous and Infamous Last Words, 1991

Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (by John Densmore with Phil Cousineau), 1992

The Soul of the World: A Modern Book of Hours (with Eric Lawton), 1993

Soul: An Archaeology: Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles, 1993

Prayers at 3 A.M.: Poems, Songs, Chants for the Middle of the Night, 1995

Design Outlaws: On the Frontier of the 21st Century (with Christopher Zelov), 1996

Soul Moments: Marvelous Stories of Synchronicity, 1997

The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred, 1998

Riddle Me This: A World Treasury of Word Puzzles, Folk Wisdom, and Literary Conundrums, 1999

The Soul Aflame: A Modern Book of Hours (with Eric Lawton), 2000

The Book of Roads: Travel Stories, 2000

Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Modern Times, 2001

The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life, 2003

The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the True Spirit of the Great Games, 2004

The Blue Museum: Poems, 2004

A Seat at the Table: The Struggle for American Indian Religious Freedom, 2005

Angkor Wat: The Marvelous Enigma (photographs) 2006

Night Train: New Poems, 2007

The Jaguar People: An Amazonian Chronicle (photographs), 2007

Stoking the Creative Fires: 9 Ways to Rekindle Your Passion and Imagination, 2008

Fungoes and Fastballs: Great Moments in Baseball Haiku, 2008

The Meaning of Tea (with Scott Chamberlin Hoyt), 2009

City 21: The Search for the Second Enlightenment (with Christopher Zelov), 2009

The Oldest Story in the World: A Mosaic of Meditations on Storytelling, 2010

Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words, 2010

The Song of the Open Road (photographs), 2010

Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement, 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Phil Cousineau and Richard J. Meyer. All rights reserved.

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From “Yom Kippur 1984” in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews and Criticism, selected and edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. Copyright © 1993, 1975 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

From “Voices from Lemnos, IV, Chorus” in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beyond forgiveness : reflections on atonement / edited by Phil Cousineau ; foreword by Huston Smith.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-470-90773-3 (pbk.); 978-0-470-94003-7 (ebk); 978-0-470-94004-4 (ebk); 978-1-118-02670-0 (ebk).

1. Forgiveness. 2. Atonement. I. Cousineau, Phil.

BJ1476.B49 2011

179'.9—dc22

2010040033

Forgiveness is better than revenge.

—Heraclitus (535–475 BCE)

Find someone like yourself. Find others.

Agree you will never desert each other.

Understand that any rift among you

means power to those who want to do you in. . . .

This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?

If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.

—Adrienne Rich, “Yom Kippur 1984”

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. . . . It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

—Ian McEwan, Atonement

To Bob Schnekenburger, my foreman at Industrial & Automotive Fasteners, in Detroit, whose stories about serving as a Green Beret in Vietnam were my first painful lessons in the need for finding truth and reconciliation in all our wars

FOREWORD

atonement as a spiritual path

Huston Smith

Being persuaded to repent doesn’t mean simply to feel sorry. It requires backing up—full speed astern—to reverse the human tendency to go one’s own way, as the following story of a twentieth-century Zen monk shows.

This monk lived as a recluse in a hut on the side of a mountain. His only possessions were his robe, his straw sandals, and the bowl with which he begged for his food in the nearby village. The evening after a thief stole his sandals and bowl, he wrote:

The moon still shines

in my window. Unstolen

by the thief.

His freedom from attachments, as demonstrated in this haiku, was one of the reasons the villagers revered him.

One day, as the monk was on his daily walk seeking food, a mother invited him into her home to share the noonday meal with her and her son, whom (she explained before they entered the house) she hoped the monk could straighten out, for the lad was a delinquent and was clearly headed for trouble.

When the son was called, he barely acknowledged the monk’s presence, and he stared sullenly at the table throughout the meal. The monk too remained silent as they all ate. But as the monk was preparing to leave, the son did deign to do his duty. As he stooped to tie the monk’s straw sandals, he felt a drop of warm water fall on his head. Looking up, he saw tears streaming down the monk’s face. The monk’s compassion for what was in store for the young man prompted him to mend his ways.

This true story offers a beautiful example of the “power made perfect in weakness” that St. Paul extolled in the New Testament, and it sets the right tone for the interpretation of atonement I am attempting to give. Apart from God, who is love, love is a response to incoming love. And the most powerful demonstration of the sender’s love is to let the receiver know that the sender suffers the pain the recipient suffers—in God’s case infinitely, for there is nothing halfway about God.

In the Zen story, when the tear fell, the son realized—and actually experienced—the sorrow, the pain, in the monk. The weeping of the monk was a salvific act because it opened the heart of the son and kept him from being totally self-centered. The monk’s tear brought into the son’s heart the pain of another.

This story illustrates how compassion allows us to feel what someone else feels, which in turn allows us to forgive them, and to forgive ourselves, as we travel on the spiritual path.

What the wisdom traditions tell us is that we are in good hands. Out of gratitude, we are called to relieve each other’s burdens, and to forgive each other, which is why there is an emphasis on forgiveness and atonement in all the world’s religions.

I recall a former student of mine, Douglas George-Kanentiio, a member of the Iroquois tribe, telling me at the 1999 Parliament of World’s Religions, in Cape Town, South Africa, that the great gift he had received from our time there was his encounter with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission organized by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. He said he was so inspired by what the South Africans had accomplished through their acts of forgiveness and restitution and commitment to nonviolence that he wanted to try to apply their recommendations to his own people’s situation. The Iroquois had experienced violence, discrimination, and racism similar to what the black South Africans had endured, and now it was important for his people to reach new ways of forgiveness and restitution, as well as reviving traditional forms of restorative justice. To bring together people who need reconciliation requires a recognition and acceptance of our own shortcomings, our flaws, our imperfections. At the heart of atonement, which has at its root the idea of reconciliation, is the recovery of our wholeness.

The power of the acts of forgiveness and atonement is the recognition of the flaw in all of us, without exception, as well as the realization of our ultimate unity. When we are “at one,” we are united, side by side, and together. Our sense of ourselves as separate is illusion, what our senses report. As the ancients told us, the senses are false witnesses. In poetic idiom, “Life is real, life is earnest / And things are not as they seem.”

It is as if we were gazing on a cloudless sky through a transom in which nine panes of glass are held together by two horizontal and two vertical bars. Looking through that transom, we see the sky as consisting of nine pieces. But of course the sky itself is not so divided. And neither are we.

Welcome to Phil Cousineau’s important book.

PREFACE

the next step in forgiveness and healing

Phil Cousineau

Throughout history people have had to make difficult, even heartrending decisions about how to respond to the suffering they have endured at the hands of other human beings—or to the pain they themselves have inflicted upon other people.

Over and over, we are confronted with the dilemma of how to respond to the cruelty and suffering that can pervade our lives. Do we forgive, or do we retaliate? Should we make peace or exact revenge? Can we live alongside our enemies, or do we seek retribution? And what about the harm we have caused? Is it possible for us to ever undo or make up for the damage we may have wreaked on the world?

From the earliest times different cultures have resolved their conflicts and meted out justice in their own way. Traditionally there have been two widely diverging paths—punishment or reform—which are rooted in retribution and forgiveness, respectively. The first is antagonistic and adversarial; the second, compassionate and cooperative. The difference between the two is dramatic. As the Chinese proverb has it, “If you are hell-bent on revenge, dig two graves”—one for your enemy and one for you. Revenge buries us in bitterness; hate immerses us in anger.

While retaliation has earned the lion’s share of attention over the centuries, more measured responses to both personal and collective conflicts have also been practiced. The instinct to be vindictive may be as old as stone, but the impulse toward reconciliation runs like an ancient underground river. And like water dissolving stone, if it flows long enough, so too can acts of compassion dissolve anger, the showing of remorse prompt forgiveness, and the making of amends alleviate guilt.

None of these paths is easy.

Nor do we find much encouragement, in a world riven by seemingly endless cycles of violence, to ask for forgiveness, still less to offer our own to someone who may have hurt us. But if we miss the moment for real reconciliation, we miss the chance to heal and move beyond the bitterness or guilt that can suffocate our lives.

Despite all the injunctions to exact revenge, from the hijacking of religious beliefs to testosterone-driven media violence, an impressive range of alternatives remains. Many distinguished scientists and philosophers now call into doubt the long-held belief that human beings are hardwired for violence, doomed by what anthropologist Robert Ardrey infamously called “the territorial imperative,” victimized by what has been named “the demon seed phenomenon,” or paralyzed by the “selfish genes” that reputedly determine our fate.

Instead there is ample and encouraging evidence that “Trend is not destiny,” as the eminent microbiologist René Dubos boldly concluded in A God Within.

Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California and director of its Brain and Creativity Institute, believes that our early ancestors were far more likely to survive if they were able to respond to a friend who needed help, or felt compassion for an enemy who was writhing in pain. Similarly, cultural historian Susan Griffin believes that strong research reveals that human beings can and do change even their most deeply engrained violent and selfish behavior. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning book A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, she writes, “It is perhaps a choice each of us makes over and over, even many times throughout one day, whether to use knowledge as power or intimacy.”

Indeed evidence is mounting that the urge to act selflessly and live cooperatively was among the transcendent forces that helped our ancestors wrench themselves away from the grip of brute instinct, and bound us together into tribes and communities. In our own time, many political and spiritual leaders have exhorted us to practice forgiveness because it helps to cultivate the powers of empathy that helps solidify our relationships with others. While anger and violence may have spilled the most ink, from Homer’s epics to Cormac McCarthy’s novels, sophisticated forgiveness practices based on compassion, reprieve, amnesty, clemency, mercy, absolution, restitution, and restorative justice have also commanded great attention and exacted enormous influence. In ancient Greece the word metanoia referred to a sudden change of mind but also to repentance. Change is the operative word, the heart of the drama that reveals how we might creatively and compassionately respond to violence.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha said, “Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.” “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” Christ said as he died on the cross. The Koran states, “Hold to forgiveness, command what is right; but turn away from the ignorant.” To Mother Teresa we owe, “People are illogical and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.” Dag Hammarskjöld, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said, “Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean.” In the spring of 2009, Zainab Salbi, an Iraqi-American who works with women victims of war, said, “I think we need to forgive for our own health and healing. Without forgiveness, it’s hard to move on.” Recently, Huston Smith, the beloved historian of religion, wrote, “So the power of the act of forgiveness is the recognition of the flaw in all of us.”

And yet there lingers a disturbing feeling. To forgive is noble; to be forgiven can be a reprieve. But surely there must be more to reconciliation between aggrieved peoples; otherwise, individuals, families, and entire cultures wouldn’t have been whiplashed by cycles of violence throughout history. As indispensable as forgiveness has been to the healing process, another equally profound action is needed for real reconciliation, which Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, calls “the other side of the coin.” Turning over the coin of forgiveness, we discover atonement, the semi-hidden, much overlooked half of the reconciliation process. Atonement is the act that proves the depth of our desire to be forgiven, or to forgive; it is the process of making things right, the restoration of some semblance of balance in our lives.

“If someone steals my pen and uses it for a year,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in 1987, “but being contrite, comes to me and returns my pen and begs for forgiveness, my response is to ask for compensation for the use of my pen, for the ink used and for some indication of contrition/repentance by the offender.”

To paraphrase Tutu’s famous injunction in the fight against apartheid, “Forgiveness makes the future possible,” while atonement makes the present possible. A gesture as simple as replacing a stolen pen or as complex as war reparations makes the present moment not just better but tolerable. Without offering those who wrong us, however seriously, the chance to make amends, or granting ourselves the opportunity to atone for any hurt we have caused, we remain stuck in the past; we suffer from a kind of “soul rust” and are unable to live fully in the present moment. The real work in conflict resolution is bringing these two practices of forgiveness and atonement together, whenever they have been split apart like cordwood, until we can say, in the spirit of the Irish bard Van Morrison, that “the healing has begun.”

Or as the soul singer Sam Cooke sang, plaintively, sorrowfully, and yet hopefully, after witnessing the first civil rights marches, “A change is gonna come.”

Reconciliation

In Atonement, Ian McEwan’s “symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness,” an elderly novelist attempts, through the alchemy of her storytelling, to atone for a tragic mistake she made as a thirteen-year-old girl:

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. . . . It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

When I first read those lines, shortly after the book was published, I was immediately catapulted back in time to 1975, to the six months I spent working as a volunteer at Ashdot Ya’akov, a kibbutz in Israel’s Jordan Valley. Every two weeks a large contingent of German students arrived at the kibbutz to work with us in the date groves, banana fields, and chicken coops. I was told by the kibbutzniks that the students had been sent there by the German government to ensure that the next generation would better appreciate Jewish culture, and never again demonize it. When I asked an old kibbutznik named Udi, who worked with me in the very date groves he had planted in 1909, how he felt about working alongside young German volunteers, he gritted his teeth and revealed to me that seventy out of seventy-two members of his family had perished in the grisly concentration camp at Auschwitz. “It is very, very hard for me to forgive, but this is a beginning, a hard beginning, but a beginning. . . .”

Since then Germany has continued its efforts to atone for the horrors of the Holocaust. It has paid out billions of dollars in reparations, returned thousands of items of stolen property, and made other amends, such as passing laws against political extremism and making it illegal to display symbols of Nazism.

Fifteen years after my stint on the kibbutz, in the winter of 1990, I received a phone call from a filmmaker from Mill Valley, California. Gary Rhine told me he was making a documentary film about the Wounded Knee massacre and its aftermath among the Dakota Sioux. Would I help? (How could I say no?) I gladly looked at the rough cut and was deeply stirred by the footage, but I had to know something before I signed on. Why was he making the film? Without hesitation, Gary told me that he was Jewish and that his family in Europe had been decimated by the Nazis during World War II. There was nothing he could do about that now, he confided, but he could do something about what he called the “American Holocaust,” the wanton destruction of American Indians and their culture. He could help them tell their stories, and over the course of a few documentary films, he wanted to try to train some young Native Americans to tell their own stories with cameras. Together, over the next thirteen years, we made six films about the American Indian struggle for religious and political freedom. In his own remarkably selfless way my friend “Rhino” was offering to atone for the entire culture—a powerful act of reconciliation offered to the Five Hundred Nations for the transgressions of the past five hundred years. As he was fond of saying, “People don’t change when they see the light; they change when they feel the heat.” And the most effective heat, he believed, came when people shared their stories because it was the most effective way to realize that we have more in common than we ever dreamed of.

The Root Meaning of “At-One-Ment”

Early in the fourteenth century the word atone appeared in print for the first time. At that time it simply meant “to be in accord with, to make or become united or reconciled.” Or as the mystics said, “To become one again with our Oneness.” Two centuries later, the word was adapted and expanded by William Tyndale (1494–1536), a leader of the English Reformation and an early lexicographer. Tyndale had been frustrated by the lack of a direct translation of the biblical concept of reconciliation with God, and to better convey this core belief of his faith he combed ancient Hebrew and Greek manuscripts before finally combining two words, at and onement. For Tyndale, the new compound word reflected what he believed to be the numinous power of the sacrifice on the Cross symbolized the reconnection of humanity with the divine. Today, to atone generally means “to make amends for” but also carries connotations of being “at one with, in harmony.”

Remarkably, the idea even shows up in the world of modern art. The influential art critic Arthur Danto regarded Barnett Newman’s epic 1948 painting Onement I as conveying exactly this notion of unity and ultimate harmony. What Newman painted was, as Danto wrote, “the condition of being one, as in the incantation ‘God is one.’ It refers, one might say, to the oneness of God.”

The myriad shades of meaning of the word are reflected in the solemn Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a time of ritual rest, fasting, and prayer in which observants seek forgiveness for any transgressions committed over the previous year, amend behavior, and make repentance for the purpose of reorganizing their personal and community life to augment the process of change. Rabbi Michael Lerner says, “The great message of these High Holy Days is that change is possible—we are not stuck.” For centuries these holidays have been a cause, Lerner explained to me, of “great joy for the force of healing and transformation that God makes possible,” and they allow us to acknowledge that “this world is co-created by all of us, and we atone for all of it.”

Beyond the Judeo-Christian traditions, many indigenous cultures, from American Indians to New Guinea tribesmen, enforce strict rituals and ceremonies aimed at restoring the balance of life undone after battles, indiscretions, or violations of taboos. In the powerful documentary film from Australia, Breaking Bows and Arrows, a New Guinea Bougainvillean tribesman named Frances Boisibere painfully confesses to a vengeance killing in a nearby village, then fulfills the requirement for the traditional reconciliation ceremony. “So we could have peace and they have peace, too,” Boisibere says, “and so we do not pass [revenge] on.” What kind of peace? Boisibere says it is the kind that comes from their old peacemaking rituals that “clear the conscience, lift the heaviness, eliminate heartache, and have done with our sorrow.”

Over time the understanding and practice of atonement has evolved from its theological underpinnings to more generally refer to an act that rights a wrong, makes amends, repairs harm, offers restitution, attempts compensation, clears the conscience of the offender, relieves the anger of the victim, and serves justice with a sacrifice commensurate with the harm that has been done.

If performed willingly and honestly, atoning acknowledges the harm and the grief of the victim that, if not dealt with, often leads to a wider cycle of revenge in communities. Anger and shame are open wounds that can fester for decades—as I can attest to after one unforgettable exchange with the wife of a Vietnam War veteran. She confided to me that her husband’s one trip of atonement back to Vietnam, in which he helped build an orphanage, had healed him more than twenty years of psychotherapy.

The profound truth lurking inside this active, almost alchemical aspect of atonement is beautifully borne out by Goethe, in the Atonement section of his poem “Trilogy.” There, he elegantly describes how the “lightened heart” offers itself willingly and with joy in “grateful payment” for a sweet gift of “music and love.” Five concise lines are all it takes for the great German poet to reveal repentance as the secret heart of atonement. The word itself derives from the Old French repentir, to feel deep regret, through the Latin paentiere, to make sorry, from the earlier Greek paena, pain and payment, as in the offering of blood money. So atonement costs us something—pride, humility, time, money. If it doesn’t involve a sacrifice of some kind, it isn’t real atonement.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek playwright Aeschylus asked, “What atonement is there for blood spilt upon the earth?” All over the earth people are still wondering the same thing. For many, the example of Mohandas Gandhi’s practice of satyagraha, or nonviolence, has proved to be the modern answer to Aeschylus’ plaintive cry because it has helped transform our attitudes toward peacemaking. Stories about Gandhi’s personal responses to violence read like modern parables. One such contemporary story is Khaled Hosseini’s powerful novel The Kite Runner. Amir is an exiled Afghani writer, living in San Francisco, who has been racked with lifelong guilt over his betrayal of his best friend, Hassan, the son of the family servant, when they were boys growing up in Kabul. When his friend’s father calls Amir and pleads for him to return to Afghanistan, he recoils with fear. But when Amir is told, “And now there’s a way to be good again,” he recognizes the chance for redemption. At great peril, Amir returns to the harrowing violence of his homeland, and despite great risk to his life, he finds a way to atone for his youthful betrayal. As Richard Corliss wrote in his review of the movie in Time magazine, it is a story that “makes you believe there may be justice in the world,” which is a clear and concise way to describe the effect of going beyond forgiveness to an act of atonement. It has the uncanny power to restore balance and justice.

When the virulent apartheid government in South Africa was overthrown in 1994 by the potent combination of strong international condemnation and domestic resistance, President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission startled the world with their approach to reconciliation and peacemaking. As Tutu’s biographer, John Allen, wrote in Tutu: Rabble-Rouser for Peace, the new democratically elected leaders offered their former persecutors “amnesty in exchange for truth [and] healing in place of retribution.” One of the first moves Mandela made as president has become emblematic of the black South African efforts to transcend the impulse to exact revenge. Turning to his own former prison guards on Robben Island, where he was incarcerated for over twenty years, Mandela offered them jobs as ferry pilots and prison guides when the island became a tourist site.

“This kind of justice,” Tutu said later that year, “seeks to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be integrated into the community he or she has injured by his or her offense.”

Today many courts are echoing the commission’s vision of restorative justice. That vision was an outgrowth of traditional African peacemaking practices, which in turn were rooted in an ancient tribal belief in the ultimate interconnection of all people. Nowhere is this better expressed than in the African proverb, “I am because you are; you are because we are.”

In 2000 a judge in Atlanta sentenced four white-racist arsonists to rebuild the black church they had deliberately burned down. In 2007 a judge in New Hampshire ordered nine college students who had drunkenly trashed poet Robert Frost’s home to apologize, clean up the mess, and then take classes with Frost’s biographer, Jay Parini, to learn why their crime was so disrespectful and had caused so much grief.

In 2007 the government of Brazil created the Amnesty Commission in an effort to seek forgiveness from hundreds of victims of torture during military rule in the mid-1970s. But the government too has gone a step further, offering what the Rev. Fred Morris, himself a torture victim, calls a “lump sum of money and a lifetime pension as a gesture of compensation.” What this atonement process is accomplishing, he concludes, is to help the entire country “regain its dignity after the horrors of the military regime.”

The Indian rights lawyer James Botsford reports that in Wisconsin, the Tribal Judges Association has been working with the Indian Law Office of Wisconsin Judicare over the past few years to encourage the reemergence and revitalization of peacemaking in their tribal courts and tribal communities.

“Forty tribal people,” he writes, “from eight of Wisconsin’s eleven tribes have gone through a week-long certification course in mediation and taken supplemental training on Indian specific cultural components in peacemaking. Several tribal courts here have begun using peacemaking/mediation as a way for parties to resolve their conflicts without litigation.” The difference, he explains, is that the Western way of justice is firmly based on adversarial law, whose goal is an outcome only one side needs to feel is just. Unfortunately, he adds, the approach emphasizes winning to such a degree that it demands a loser. “Punishment,” he adds, “penalty, and judgments force us to miss opportunities to educate, grow, learn and heal.”

Over the years, Botsford has described to me several inspiring examples of the revival of tribal peacemaking, or what the Indian elders playfully refer to as “original dispute resolution.” One story from a reservation community stands out. It seems that there was a particularly incorrigible Native kid who deliberately broke an old woman’s window and spray-painted her house. Recently, Botsford wrote to me:

A Peacemaking session was convened with all the stakeholders in this kid’s life. They gathered in a traditional Talking Circle. A feather was passed around and around until all was said that had to be said. By then it was learned that the kid was acting out, angry that his home life was lousy, even dangerous. His father was a drunken jerk, and beat the kids and their mother. The kid’s grandparents were summoned to meet along with tribal clan elders. Together, they decided that the reprobate of a father needed to make some serious adjustments in his behavior, and he was required to apologize to his wife and his kids. Instead of exiling the boy to the juvenile detention center, which was many miles away, he was told to apologize to the old woman, repair her house, and to fetch her groceries for six months. But that’s not all. When the elders learned that the kid liked working with wood he was assigned to a tribal elder, what we would call a mentor, who was a woodworker. Since then all of his healing and atonement has been monitored by a periodic review with the tribal elders.

Uncannily, not long after I read Botsford’s story I came across an article in the Irish Times that seemed to be a poignant echo of these nascent attempts at restorative justice. Addressing the need to allow a second chance to youths guilty of petty crimes in Ireland, Eammonn Mac Aodha wrote to the editors, “While society must be protected from those who might pose it a threat, it is vital we let people get on with their lives once they have atoned.”

The Next Step

For me, Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement resembles one of those Age of Exploration ships that explored vast, uncharted, dangerous seas in search of spices, treasure, and knowledge. The era’s mapmakers often sketched dragons in the blank spaces of the Seven Seas, where no Europeans had ever sailed. On some maps, underneath those creatures you can still read playful captions, such as “Here Be Dragons” or “Sleeping Beauties Lie Here,” poetic suggestions that unmapped worlds might reveal marvels to be embraced rather than perils to be avoided.

Such is the spirit in which the following fifteen essays and interviews in this book are offered. While a great deal has been written and published about forgiveness in our time, the idea of moving beyond it to atonement is mostly uncharted territory for modern people. For many, the most recognizable equivalent of atonement in our time is what Archbishop Tutu called restitution during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. The contributors to this volume offer a series of exhilarating discoveries within our court systems, international negotiations, business transactions, and personal relationships that provide powerful alternatives to lives spent plotting revenge or lashing out with reprisals. These authors help us realize that in dispute resolution we always have a choice when confronting the seemingly intractable conflicts that trouble the world. We can view our disputes either as monstrous beasts or as slumbering beauties, as if peaceful reconciliation is waiting to be awakened.

While still a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which he helped found, Archbishop Tutu wrote:

Unless you deal with the past in a creative and positive manner, then you run the terrible risk of having no future worth speaking of. The past can have a baleful or beneficial impact on the future. South Africa will be seriously undermined if those who benefited from the obnoxious apartheid system, perceived as the oppressors, will not ask for forgiveness for the awful things done under apartheid and if the victims, the oppressed, do not offer forgiveness.

As National Geographic magazine reports in its June 2010 issue, the “day of reckoning” in South Africa came in the early 1990s, but its repercussions are still unfolding. Deon Snyman, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, says, “Those who supported the system of apartheid need to apologize in a way that will feel sincere. Then they need to make amends in a way that restores some of the dignity and some of the material opportunities that had eroded under that system.” His solution is a powerful illustration of the need to move beyond forgiveness, as noble and vital as that is, to the next and clinching stage of reconciliation, which is needed to end the cycles of violence seen in his country. What is still needed, he says, is “community-led restitution—the creation of such emblems of remorse, a school, a clinic, or a skills-training center.”

Since November 2009, human rights groups have been demanding that in cases where political prisoners have been considered for presidential pardons, their victims must be given a chance to tell their story. Many of these victims appearing in court wore a T-shirt that read, “No reconciliation without truth, reparation, redress.”

On February 23, 2010, the South African Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the victims, many of whom have since been able to regain some of their dignity by telling the world what happened. As one woman, who had been tortured under apartheid, said after her day in court, she feels she is no longer a victim and can move on with her life.

Creative and positive, ceaseless and courageous, atonement is, as Senator Ted Kennedy wrote in his memoirs just before his passing in the summer of 2009, “a never-ending process.” Never-ending, but never less than worthy, because atonement speaks to the secret part of us that needs to prove we are sorry for committing a terrible wrong, to show some proof that our words—“I’m sorry”—are not empty, but will be backed up by an action that stops the soul rust threatening to corrode our lives.

For Senator Kennedy’s fellow senator Robert Byrd, remorse took decades to unfold. In the early 1940s, Byrd had been an “Exalted Cyclops” in the Ku Klux Klan, an association he later regarded as “an immutable stain,” and which he feared would irreparably harm his legacy. Nonetheless, as Frank Rich, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times in the summer of 2010, wrote, “His résumé in racism was dwarfed not just by his efforts to atone for it but by his legislative achievements on many fronts during his epic Senate career.”

Our sense of sustainable justice demands action if the gap between forgiveness and atonement, apologies and restitution is not closed, if our contrition is not expressed by a meaningful act that reconciles the offender with his or her victim.

Consider the report from the Melbourne Herald-Sun, in July 2010, that when Archbishop Denis Hart apologized to victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, the Forgotten Australian Action Group’s spokesperson Louise Goode remarked, “It’s farcical if it isn’t followed by the action of atonement, which needs to be expressed in a financial way. The apology must come with redress and compensation.” The Melbourne Victim’s Collective said the apology, though sincere, was just words, and that “concrete and practical reform” were needed, such as abuse education for clergy and parishioners alike.

Similarly, Financial Times.com called for “acts of atonement” from the British government for the deaths of fourteen Irish Catholics on “Bloody Sunday,” in Londonderry in 1972. Atonement is also called for in the “one man crusade” by Efraim Zuroff, the Israeli director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, for war crimes against Jews by Lithuanian partisans during World War II. “The Lithuanians,” Zuroff told CNN in 2010, “squandered the best chance they had to get that burden of guilt off them. And now it’s going to take them 100 years to get rid of it. The only way to succeed is through education, documentation, research—and a lot of pain.”

As Zuroff points out so succinctly, part of the power of atonement is that it has the potential to lift our guilt, accept responsibility for wrongs committed, and assuage our pain, no matter how much time has passed.

According to the Providence Journal, in Rhode Island, Brown University has begun “fulfilling its vow of atonement.” After intrepid researchers uncovered the university’s unsettling ties to the early slave trade, it has moved steadily forward in a series of amends. Brown is expanding its African studies department, establishing a fellowship for the study of the slave trade, hiring seventy-nine-year-old Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as a teacher, and bringing in historian Jane Lancaster to “revise the university’s history.” A slave memorial is planned for the campus.

But atonement and amends are not limited to academia and religious organizations. Redemption in one form or another has long been a recurrent theme in the movie industry, from Luc Besson’s Joan of Arc to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, Roland Joffé’s Mission, Sidney Lumet’s Verdict, Jane Anderson’s Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, Marc Forster’s Kite Runner, and Clint Eastwood’s remarkable Gran Torino. In this last film, Eastwood’s character, a grizzled Korean war vet, retired Ford factory worker, and recent widower named Walt Kowalski is confronted by his Hmong next-door neighbor. She has brought her brother Thao over to his house because “he wants to make amends” for trying to steal Walt’s beloved car, his 1972 Gran Torino. At first Walt balks, as many do when offered restitution, but eventually he relents, allowing the boy to wash his car and make repairs to the dilapidated Hmong house across the street. Against all odds, the resentment and suspicion, the guilt and shame dissolve, and one of the most unusual and touching friendships in recent movie history is born, which precipitates a startling, cathartic atonement in the final scene.

What all the above stories, anecdotes, and research have in common can be compressed into a single observation that my old friend, the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, told me was the core of all the great wisdom traditions throughout history: “The ultimate metaphysical realization is that . . . you and the other are one.”

INTRODUCTION

the revival of an ancient awareness

Richard J. Meyer

When I first encountered the famous speech by Chief Keokuk (Kiyo’kaga), I felt many deep and conflicting emotions, including shock, inspiration, awe, and confusion. I asked, and I continue to ask, how this tribal Sauk chief could say these words while he and his nation were being sentenced to the Trail of Tears. His words brought tears to my eyes:

The many moons and sunny days we have lived here will long be remembered by us. The Great Spirit has smiled upon us and made us glad. But we have agreed to go. We go to a country we know little of. Our home will be beyond a great river on the way to the setting sun. We will build our wigwams there in another land. . . . In peace we bid you good-bye. . . . If you come to see us, we will gladly welcome you.

How could he even think of a future where “we will gladly welcome you”? What spiritual source had this leader tapped?