"He who seeks vengeance must dig two graves: one for his enemy and one for himself." Chinese proverb
One Saturday morning 14 years ago, Veda Allen's son, Everette Farmer, 22, went out to run some errands. What happened next, she doesn't remember too clearly - only, really, the knock at the door, the one many mothers dread.
It was a friend of her son's, there to tell her that a gunman had just accosted her boy in the streets. He was dead. The sudden loss of a child is an almost incomprehensible blow, but Allen found, to her amazement, that her sorrow was only beginning. For weeks, she woke up every morning crying out, "Oh, no, God, I'm still here." Her grief was so heavy it seemed to pin her to her bed. And when her darkness started enveloping her family - "I watched them just ball up," she says - she saw that the killer's crime was on the verge of claiming them all.
What happened next, Allen doesn't wholly understand, but she began to pray for the man who killed her son.
She has no great love for the offender, who never spent time in jail. She must work, day to day, to sustain her attitude of good will. But her decision bears out what a growing number of behavioral scientists have been learning: forgiveness heals.
"If I hadn't started [those prayers], I'd be homeless, in an insane asylum, maybe ready to commit murder myself," says Allen, 58, with three surviving grown children and 16 grandchildren. "Now, I can see the goodness in life and share it with the people I love. Without forgiveness, I'd have nothing."
Strangely enough for a virtue that has underpinned the world's great religions for millennia, forgiveness has been in the news a lot lately.
Two weeks ago, Yoko Ono took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, proclaiming tomorrow, the 26th anniversary of the slaying of her husband, Beatles member John Lennon, a day of world forgiveness and healing.
"Let's wish strongly that one day we will be able to say that we healed ourselves, and by healing ourselves, we healed the world," she wrote in a meandering open letter. She added, almost as an afterthought, that "as the widow of one who was killed by an act of violence, I don't know if I am ready yet to forgive the one who pulled the trigger."
In October, the Amish of Lancaster County, Pa., awed countless people with their unflinching and immediate forgiveness of the man who killed five schoolgirls in their community.
Then last month, O.J. Simpson briefly sought to peddle a book about the 1994 slayings of his wife and her friend, Ron Goldman. Goldman's father, Fred, still seemed consumed by anger toward the athlete-actor who'd been accused and acquitted in criminal court of the killings - a living reminder of the heartbreaking consequences of unforgiveness.
A human condition
For the famous and the not-so-famous, forgiveness is always a current event, because it's basic to the human condition.
"People will always hurt each other, betray each other in large ways and small," says Kim Sutter, a pastoral counselor who has practiced in Baltimore for more than 20 years. "As long as we live in a fallen world, there will be injustices. Forgiveness is the only thing that breaks the chain of bad human behavior."
In 1995, a Spokane, Wash., religion professor, Jerry Sittser, published A Grace Disguised, a book in which he recounted the head-on auto collision in Idaho that killed his wife, mother and son, shattering his life in an instant. By way of reclaiming that life, he explored and described the nature of healthy grieving. Our attitudes toward loss, he says, are more significant than the losses themselves.
Unforgiveness "can occur on a smaller scale, as we [see] in family feuds, gang warfare and conflicts between former friends," he writes. "[Or] it can occur on a large scale, as we see in Northern Ireland or in the Middle East. ... More destruction has been done from unforgiveness than from all the wrongdoing in the world that created the conditions for it."
An inability to forgive on a personal level "makes a person sick by projecting the same scene of pain into the soul day after day," Sittser writes, "as if it were a videotape that never stops. That repetition pollutes the soul." Forgiveness means, among other things, "that we refuse to play the videotape over and over again. We put it on the shelf. ... We play other tapes that are healing to us."
Forgiveness has become a hot topic among researchers in numerous fields, from sociology to religion to psychiatry.
Robert Enright, an author and educational psychology professor, founded the International Forgiveness Institute at the University of Wisconsin in 1994, whose thrice-yearly publication, The World of Forgiveness, spotlights the study of forgiveness in fields from the law to English literature. The John Marks Templeton Foundation, based near Philadelphia, has contributed millions to studies that apply scientific method to forgiveness and other spiritual research. Everett Worthington, a Richmond marriage and family counselor who directs the Virginia-based A Campaign for Forgiveness Research, a nonprofit fundraising organization, says when he worked on a forgiveness book in 1998, the authors cited 58 studies. Last year, a similar project cited 950.
Those struggling to forgive also have more resources today than ever, including books and Web sites. The Enright Forgiveness Inventory, an "objective measure of the degree to which one person forgives another," is available online at forgiveness-institute.org.
Almost all touch on the healthy nature of forgiving. Whereas anger appears to depress the immune system, studies increasingly show that forgiveness is associated with better cardiovascular health, lower blood pressure, reduced incidence of substance abuse and fewer stress symptoms, among other benefits.
Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests that forgiving works a strange magic.
Martha Boynton, an Annapolis Sunday school teacher, was bicycling just before Christmas 2002 when a drunken driver smashed into her, causing many catastrophic injuries. She says intensive prayer exposed the meaning of the tragedy in her life, helped her release her anger and healed her with a speed that astonished the Shock Trauma medical team.
She and her husband prayed daily for the perpetrator's salvation. At the sentencing hearing, she explained exactly how the accident had shattered her life. She forgave him. The repeat offender, by most accounts a hardened criminal, apologized and took responsibility.
The state's attorney told her he'd never witnessed a more poignant scene. Boynton believes the perpetrator felt the Lord's presence. "I saw remorse in his eyes," she says.
Wired for revenge
Forgiveness, at least up to a point, runs counter to the human personality.
Worthington's passion for the subject had its origins in his devout Christian faith, which he says compels him to be merciful, as the Jesus of Matthew 6:14 exhorted followers to be. "For if you forgive men when they sin against you," he said, "your heavenly Father will also forgive you."
But making the leap can be counterintuitive. It can be pleasurable to hold onto anger, an emotion that offers a feeling of power and self-determination - appealing to anyone who has been victimized.
In the short run, "anger can energize a person to positive action," creating an outlet and a semblance of control, Enright says. In the long run, though, anger "can turn to resentment, which can be destructive to the person harboring [it], especially if it is abiding and deep."
Some get stuck on the question of justice, thinking that to forgive is to condone or accept bad behavior. Experts say this is not the case.
"Mercy does not abrogate justice," writes Sittser, the religion professor. "It transcends [justice]. Wrong that is forgiven is still wrong and must be punished."
Others make the all-too-human mistake of waiting for an unfaithful spouse's relationship to fail, a criminal to be put away or a perpetrator to express remorse before committing to forgiveness. But that's a mistake, experts say. Pinning one's hopes on external outcomes just forfeits control all over again.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, is not outcome-dependent.
"Forgiveness is not some airy-fairy feeling," Sutter says. "It's not a feeling. It's a choice you make, an act of the conscious will."
Even biology works against forgiveness. Human beings, Worthington says, are "basically hard-wired for revenge. ... A [recent] Swiss study shows that most people will punish [offenders] rather than forgive them, even at a cost to themselves." As the study's subjects administered punishment, their brain scans even showed neurochemical "pleasure pathways" brightly lit.
Enright wasn't surprised when the Amish community forgave so unreservedly.
"They know of injustices in this world," he says, "and spent many, many years living [humbly], building their forgiveness muscles. Like a well-trained athlete or soldier, they were ready for injustice. They responded accordingly."
jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com