The Book of Joy

it going to help us if he were to go to prison? It won’t bring back our
children.’ And there is an incredible kind of nobility and strength. Yes,
it’s difficult, but it has happened. We talked about Nelson Mandela, but
there were these mothers, and many others who were not household
names, who had this magnanimity.
“In this group of mothers, the one who was speaking on their behalf
got up and went across the room to this guy who had been responsible for
the killing of their sons and embraced him and said, ‘my child.’
“Just recently I got a message about a white woman named Beth, who
was badly maimed in a bomb attack by one of the liberation movements
and still had shrapnel in her body. Many of her friends were killed and
many were also maimed. She had to be helped by her children to eat, to
be bathed. Beth was just . . . I’m overcome . . .” The Archbishop had to
pause for a moment. “Beth said . . . Beth said . . . about the perpetrator . . .
I forgive him, and I hope he forgives me.”
Then the Archbishop told the well-known story about one of my
college classmates, Amy Biehl, who had gone down to South Africa after
graduating from university to try to help. She was brutally killed while
dropping off one of her friends in a township. “Her parents came all the
way from California to South Africa to support the granting of amnesty to
the perpetrators who had been sentenced to heavy terms of imprisonment.
They said, ‘We want to be part of the process of healing in South Africa.
We are sure that our daughter would support us in saying we want
amnesty to be granted to the murderers.’ And more than this, they set up
a foundation in their daughter’s name and employed these men, who had
murdered their daughter, in the project to help the people of that
township.
“Now I don’t pretend that comes easily, but we do have a nobility of
spirit. We’ve spoken of Nelson Mandela as an amazing icon of
forgiveness,” the Archbishop said, “but you and you and you and you
have the potential to be instruments of incredible compassion and
forgiveness. We cannot say of anyone at all that they are totally unable to
forgive. I think that all of us have the latent potential, as His Holiness is
pointing out, to be sorry for these others who are disfiguring their