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The sorry fact that we don’t say ‘sorry’

Opinion & Analysis
Has there ever been a father who said to his son, “Son, I am sorry, all my life I buried my head in the sand.

Has there ever been a father who said to his son, “Son, I am sorry, all my life I buried my head in the sand.

Fr Oskar Wermter SJ

Nelson-Mandela

I did not resist the evil in our country. I allowed it to go to the dogs. Now you have no prospects, no hope, no work, no self-respect. Can you forgive me?”

I knew a girl, at the time a senior high school student, who was forced to bend over a low bench and was beaten with sticks for having “voted wrongly” by a gang of, no, not the chipangano boys, but of mature adults, women and men, for half-an-hour; bloody and bruised, she needed months to heal. Will she ever forget? And the perpetrators? Have they come and said “sorry” to her and her family? Do they really claim to have “forgotten”? Have they no conscience?

The violent ones have only one ambition, one aim, one obsession, to obtain and retain power. Asking for forgiveness would be humiliating and would mean abdicating power and rating respect for a fellow human being more highly than raw power. That they cannot do.

People shudder when they hear of satanic cults. Why? What we have been doing to each other, and still do on occasion, is much worse than fooling about with “satanic cults”. Systematically, destroying human dignity, violating the integrity of body and soul through cruelty, sexual violence and rape, “disappearances” of our opponents, and wanton killings — even Satan has nothing worse in his arsenal.

Let us try and remember whether we have ever heard one of our leaders honestly and sincerely saying “sorry” for telling lies, fraud, looting public property, hate speech, and involvement in atrocities? Or have we ourselves ever asked our brothers and sisters, wives and children, for forgiveness for having badly hurt them?

Who is prepared to climb down from the high throne of his power and glory? And maybe more importantly, who trusts that he will be forgiven? Those who have no mercy do not expect mercy themselves. Habitual liars will never expect that telling the truth “will make them free”. They will always refuse to accept even the most glaring evidence of their crimes. They are trapped in a web of lies and don’t know how to get out.

The big question is: What are our values? What are the “gods” that we worship, sacrificing everything else to them? Or, put more simply, do we accept the Ten Commandments or any moral code of conduct that limits our greed, ambition, lust?

If we do accept such limits, then surely we must say “sorry” for oversteping them every so often. Or else we don’t, in which case we will not ask for forgiveness, will never plead “guilty” even for the most gruesome crime.

Watching power-obsessed leaders you will notice that they are in a permanent state of denial, “No, we did not kill, our enemies did the killing”. Finally, overwhelmed by the incontrovertible evidence, leaders never hope to be forgiven. For them “saying sorry” is a weakness which they cannot afford. Their “gods” are merciless and never expected to forgive. Lies and deception are the only escape route.

Being confronted with the truth we hit back with a counter-attack of lies and falsehoods. This makes us blind for the real causes of our national misery. This hides the truth from us. Our conscience knows the truth, but we have killed our conscience and silenced its voice. There is no way forward in the dark. Violence is never constructive. Hate poisons, it never heals.

The only way forward is meeting those we have hurt, reach out to them, and “break the silence”. Or begin the conversation with those who have hurt us, violated us in body and soul, and denied our common humanity.

South Africa, especially leaders like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, knew that and took a great risk in starting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A new constitution was not enough for the new South Africa, it needed a new spirit of mutual understanding, forgiveness or at least acceptance. Nobody claims it was a complete success, let alone triumph. But at least they tried, and so should we. Not moving forward is going backwards, stuck in the past.

Archbishop Tutu summed it all up in his book No Future Without Forgiveness. It was a mammoth task: many perpetrators of all those crimes against humanity did not even want forgiveness, just impunity, and the victims found it understandably extremely hard to forgive.

Let us benefit from Tutu’s conclusions. “It is . . . not true that perpetrators can escape completely the consequences of their actions, because amnesty is granted only to those who plead guilty, who accept responsibility for what they have done.”.

The slogan “forgive and forget” cannot be the answer. Tutu insisted that “if the process of forgiveness and healing is to happen and succeed, ultimately acknowledgment by the culprit is almost inevitable”.

Reconciliation, based on forgiveness, goes together with truth. Without the light of truth we remain stuck in the dark of hatred and resentment. Tutu continued, “In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done…..Forgiving means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss which liberates the victim”.

One could also say that forgiveness means “reserving judgment” and abstaining from pronouncing a total condemnation. When all is said and done, we must acknowledge that there is no perfect human justice. God is the only just judge and in the end we leave it to him. “Each of us has this capacity for the most awful evil.” Those who claim complete innocence are certainly wrong.

But we have to go through the process. “There is no way that evil and injustice and oppression and lies can have the last word.”