Bone to Pick Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparations, and Revenge

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To forgive the truly horrible is to kiss the robe of God, to emulate no less a figure than the dying Jesus Christ. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Those words leapt into Colleen Kelly's mind when she realized her brother was gone forever, buried in the smoldering graveyard that had once been the World Trade Center. The architectural pride of Wall Street, an icon of America's power and beauty, was now a symbol of incomprehensible horror, an unlikely resting place for Bill.Bill was in financial services, a salesman for Bloomberg L.P. He did not normally work at the World Trade Center. So the family initially had no idea he was there. But once the planes plowed into the towers, New Yorkers everywhere picked up phones, mostly to reassure one another life would go on.Colleen learned that Bill had been attending a conference at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. And that September day it fell on her, a nurse and mother of three living in the Bronx, to make the trek into Manhattan. Sustained by the hope, the dream, that Bill had somehow made it out, she wandered from hospital to hospital, inquiring about her brother. Eventually she grew cognizant of an ominous fact: though doctors and nurses abounded, there was no one for them to treat -- no one, at any rate, from the World Trade Center. "That's when I knew Bill was dead." And that's when the words of Jesus Christ flashed through her mind. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.She realized the words made absolutely no sense, not in the present context. The terrorists had clearly known, with horrifying precision, exactly what it was that they were doing. Her response, she later concluded, stemmed not from an urge to forgive but from an almost instinctive resolve not to hate. The leap to Jesus' words on the cross was her mind's way of reaffirming values that she had clung to all her life, values that embraced peace over war. In the face of the most wrenching provocation imaginable, she rejected vengeance. "These terrorists had taken my brother," she told me over lunch many months later, "and I wasn't going to let them take anything else."Colleen was among the founders of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. The families sought to honor their lost loved ones by condemning vengeance and violence -- even if that meant visiting Iraq as America prepared to make war on Saddam Hussein, or meeting with the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called twentieth hijacker) in an effort at dialogue and reconciliation.It is not my purpose here to consider the political effectiveness or appropriateness of such efforts. I am more interested in Kelly's initial impulse, in the notion that forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values, could even be considered in the context of acts so vile as those perpetrated by the September 11 terrorists.Are some things so awful they cannot be forgiven? Or does wisdom lie closer to Kelly's instinctive response? Are some acts so horrifying, so incomprehensible, so beyond the scope of normal humanity, that they must be forgiven -- or at least consigned to that section of the heart most open to mercy and compassion, most inclined to let go of the urge to revenge?A developing school of psychology argues that forgiveness is a gift not only to the person forgiven but to those who grant the gift, those strong enough to forgive. Robert Enright, a leader in that school, sees forgiveness as a route to personal freedom, a way of rejecting the self-imposed, self-reinforcing label of victim and escaping an ultimately soul-destroying maze of anger and resentment. Indeed, practicing forgiveness may even lower your blood pressure, while relieving other ailments -- physical and mental -- traceable to the stress of chronic anger.It is not just a handful of psychologists, but also holy men and philosophers, who trumpet the benefits of