Now is the time to focus on God.
Anthony Thompson
Hate and unforgiveness prove such powerful emotions, becoming states of mind and heart that destroy everything they touch. One of the saddest, most disturbing stories of hate and unforgiveness happened decades ago and still brings tears to my eyes whenever I recall it.
Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian Jew born in the Ukraine in 1908, and his wife, Cyla, suffered greatly during the Hitler years when, in 1942, the Nazi hierarchy put into operation the “Final Solution,” the systematic annihilation of Jews. Within months, eighty-nine of their family members perished. Imprisoned in concentration camps, Simon and Cyla were skin and bones and barely alive when an American armored unit liberated them on May 5, 1945.
In his book The Sunflower, Wiesenthal told of an incident that occurred while he was a concentration camp inmate. He was sent with a prison workforce to clean a hospital filled with wounded German soldiers. As he scrubbed floors, a nurse interrupted him, asking if he was a Jew. When he told her yes, she took him to the bed of an old, dying Nazi soldier named Karl.
Karl admitted to Wiesenthal that he was unable to find any peace for his tortured soul until he confessed to a Jew the crime that had burdened him for years. He then told Wiesenthal a story that sent chills down the Jewish prisoner’s spine.
Karl described how he and his comrades, sent to fight in Russia, killed more than two hundred Jews—men, women, and children—by cramming them into a house packed with cans of flammable petrol, throwing hand grenades at them through open windows, burning babies and entire families alive, and shooting with machine guns anybody who tried to escape. The gruesome scene and agonizing guilt burdened Karl, and before he died, he yearned to find freedom from it.
Lying in a hospital bed in constant pain and waiting to die, Karl confessed his sins to Wiesenthal, wanting to finally come clean and be forgiven before he passed.
“I have waited many long and dark nights to find a Jew to serve as a representative of the Jewish people, that I might beg his forgiveness,” he told Wiesenthal. “Without forgiveness, I cannot die in peace. And I know my time is running out.”
Wiesenthal listened quietly to Karl’s confession and the dying man’s urgent pleas for forgiveness. But even with Karl’s deathbed apology, Wiesenthal could not bring himself to forgive the German soldier. He simply turned his back to Karl and left the repentant man’s room without saying a word. The next day, the nurse told Wiesenthal that Karl had died.
Wiesenthal’s decision not to forgive the dying Nazi burdened him for the rest of his life, bringing to his mind again and again over long years the haunting question: “Ought I to have forgiven him?”
After the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his entire life to aggressively hunting down Nazi war criminals, all the while believing that “God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.”1
Bringing guilty Germans to justice, he made dead sure they answered for their participation in Hitler’s Holocaust. He never rested from his ongoing pursuit to hunt down and punish those who committed inexcusable crimes against the world’s Jews. He claimed to have brought more than 1,100 criminals to justice.
Some might say that Wiesenthal’s anger was constructive, that he used the powerful emotions of hate and unforgiveness for a good and just purpose. Surely the guilty Nazi war criminals deserved to be punished for their World War II atrocities to the Jewish people. Many people around the world greatly admired Simon Wiesenthal for making it his life’s work to hunt down and exact revenge on Nazis who had fled punishment. But I wonder what happens to a lone man’s mind, heart, body, and soul when he is so driven, so consumed, so burdened for an entire lifetime by unforgiveness, anger, hatred, and resentment. Surely Wiesenthal paid a high personal price in health and relationships when he alone took on this government-sized task.
Harboring hate and unforgiveness “is like carrying a heavy burden—a burden that victims bring with them when they navigate the physical world.”2
On September 20, 2005, Wiesenthal, a tired old man of ninety-six years, died of kidney disease in Vienna, Austria, the anguished face of the dying German, Karl, still on his mind and the unanswered question still on his lips: “Ought I to have forgiven him?”3
The Medical Consequences of Unforgiveness
Science is beginning to take a hard look at the consequences of unforgiveness, noting the infirmity it can bring to minds, emotions, and bodies. Medical books now classify unforgiveness “as a disease” . . . [suggesting that] “refusing to forgive makes people sick, and keeps them that way.”
“Harboring these negative emotions, this anger and hatred,” Dr. Michael Barry states, “creates a state of chronic anxiety.” He explains how chronic anxiety produces excess adrenaline and cortisol, thus depleting “the production of natural killer cells, the body’s foot soldier in the fight against cancer.”4
Recent studies show that people who hold grudges report higher rates of heart disease and cardiac arrest, elevated blood pressure, stomach ulcers, arthritis, back problems, headaches, and chronic pain than those who don’t hold grudges. Those who practice forgiveness report greater personal well-being, including lower levels of depression, fewer physical health complaints, and higher levels of life satisfaction. Scientists also discover that those who require the offender’s contrition—his apology—in order to extend forgiveness report lower levels of well-being.
“By requiring the offender’s contrition, we’re letting a person who harmed us decide if or when we can benefit from forgiveness. That’s giving the wrongdoer a lot of control over our lives.”5
Fifty Years of Unforgiveness
The late Eric Lomax knew how living with hate for half a century could lock a man into a personal prison. One of thousands of British soldiers the Japanese held captive in 1942, Lomax was forced to help build the 418-mile Siam-Burma Railway. He and the other POWs suffered from malnutrition, overwork, and disease. At the hands of Japanese prison guards, he endured relentless torture and beatings, brutality that broke his arms, hips, and ribs. He remembered one abuser in particular, Takashi Nagase, a Japanese interpreter who was especially cruel to him.
A broken young man and overwhelmed with hate, Lomax survived the war and returned to Scotland, the country of his birth. He was damaged mentally, emotionally, and physically, weighing only 105 pounds. He discovered that during his forty-two-month imprisonment, his mother had died and his father had remarried. He had no home to return to in Scotland.
“In 1945,” Lomax wrote, “I returned to Edinburgh to a life of uncertainty, following three and half years of fear, interrogation and torture as a POW in the Far East. . . . Inside I was falling apart.”
For the next five decades, Lomax nurtured his hate and anger, fantasizing about painful ways to torture and kill the Japanese abusers, especially Takashi Nagase. His long years of loathing Nagase destroyed his relationship with his father, broke apart his marriage, and separated him forever from his two daughters. For years, he experienced violent mood swings, memory flashbacks, and painful mental trauma.
Eric Lomax was one of the many people who refused to forgive the inexcusable and ended up paying the inescapable price of unforgiveness.6
But fortunately, Eric Lomax’s story didn’t end in unforgiveness. A half century after his brutal beatings and imprisonment by the Japanese, Lomax and his abuser, Takashi Nagase, scheduled a face-to-face meeting in Kanburi, Thailand. Nagase greeted Lomax with a formal bow. Taking Lomax’s hand in his, the old, bent-over Japanese man apologized to him again and again for his past cruelty.
“I am so sorry, so very sorry,” Nagase sobbed.
Emotionally touched by Nagase’s sincere expression of regret, Lomax forgave him. The two men became friends, keeping in touch, and visiting each other until their deaths. Lomax later wrote a book about his World War II ordeal, admitting, “Some time the hating has to stop.”
Eric Lomax lived in a state of dis-ease for fifty years before he finally forgave Nagase. Unforgiveness crippled his mind and emotions and destroyed his closest relationships. His forgiveness was based on Nagase’s repentance and face-to-face apology, and while this type of societal forgiveness—conditional forgiveness—can bring some healing, it is far different from biblical forgiveness.
Scientific studies show that participants who believe God has forgiven them for their own sins and wrongdoings are more likely to offer others unconditional, unrestricted, and unqualified forgiveness.7
Unlike society’s forgiveness that is packed with myths, biblical forgiveness has no strings attached to it. It is forgiveness without conditions, needing no apology, no compensation for the loss, no face-to-face meeting, and no response from the offender. It is simply a victim’s unquestioning forgiveness given as a gift of grace to the offender. Even if one-sided, it is complete and absolute, proving far more powerful than a societal forgiveness based on a series of conditions. With biblical forgiveness, victims choose to forgive another person because they, themselves, have been completely forgiven by God. Their own sinful debt has been paid in full with no conditions—an undeserved grace gift from their heavenly Father.
I have forgiven Dylann Roof completely because God has forgiven me completely. To society, this type of no-strings-attached forgiveness seems illogical. But to Christ-believers who have experienced God’s loving and complete forgiveness, biblical forgiveness makes perfect sense.
Consumed by Hate
As of this writing, Dylann has now had three long years to think about his murderous crime. He goes from court to prison still embracing hate, having issued the powerful emotion carte blanche to dictate his life, his actions, and his future. He holds on tightly to his hostility and warped beliefs like a baby clings to a favorite blanket, wrapping himself in its pseudo security, giving it permission to seep into every word he speaks and everything he does.
I know that God can change Dylann’s heart and attitude, making him become who He wants him to be, doing what He wants him to do. And I pray that it will happen in this young man’s life.
But hatred seems to give Dylann a purpose in life, giving the drifting loner a sense of belonging to a large nationwide group of white supremacist brothers, and of fighting for a cause he imagines is greater than himself. His journal scribbles indicate that he believed an army of supporters cheered him onward in the battle for white supremacy.
“I would rather live in prison knowing I took action for my race than live with the torture of sitting idle,” Dylann wrote in his “jailhouse manifesto.”8
His statement reminded me of Satan’s words spoken in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n.”9
I marvel that someone with Dylann’s high IQ could be lured into such idiocy, so compelled to fight for such foolish beliefs, so eager and willing to give his life for an insane, dead-end ideology. He is a pitiful young man who feeds his hatred, allowing it to ruin his own life and bring crushing pain and destruction into the lives of many others. To the slaughtered victims’ family members and loved ones who chose not to forgive the young killer, Dylann has become the guard who now controls their lives, who holds the keys to their own personal prison cells, and who opens the door wide to allow hate, resentment, and bitterness to enter and take root in their hearts and minds. Only biblical forgiveness can take away Dylann’s control and keys, and open locked prison doors.
After Dylann’s April 2017 trial and federal death sentence, the unrepentant young white supremacist was transferred to a high-security U.S. federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, which houses male inmates awaiting execution. He is the first person in United States history to be convicted of a federal hate crime and sentenced to the death penalty.
Day after day he sits on death row, likely living in solitary confinement in a closet-sized cell, his meals pushed through a narrow slot in a door, his recreation nonexistent. He is given a bed, sink, and toilet, and is allowed to leave his cell only three brief times each week when he is placed inside an inescapable cage. He waits alone and isolated, day after day awaiting his scheduled death, which might take many years to happen. I pray that Dylann’s years of solitude and isolation will give him time to think, to reason, granting him some deeper understanding into his own mind and heart, perhaps forcing him to his knees in repentance, and begging God for forgiveness.
But without God’s direct divine intervention, I don’t expect Dylann to experience a positive change of heart and mind while inside the Terre Haute prison. According to new studies conducted on inmates sequestered in solitary confinement, isolated prisoners suffer heavy mental tolls, with about a third becoming “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.” One board-certified psychiatrist stated that prison solitude “can cause a specific psychiatric syndrome, characterized by hallucinations; panic attacks; overt paranoia; diminished impulse control; hypersensitivity to external stimuli; and difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory,” and that some “inmates lose the ability to maintain a state of alertness, while others develop crippling obsessions.”10
Some researchers found that solitary confinement beyond fifteen days led directly to severe and irreversible psychological harm. Without any human company and/or conversation, and “without anything to do, the brain atrophies . . . vision fades. Isolation and loss of control breeds anger, anxiety, and hopelessness.”11
I worry that Dylann’s racist hate will be nurtured in prison, not diminished, his tortured mind no longer able to make clear decisions—the choices that can change his eternal destination.
I often think about Dylann when I contemplate Psalm 139: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (vv. 13–14). God created a human being, and gave him the breath of life.
How can a person choose to distance himself from his loving Creator?
Does everything within him not cry out for God? Begging Him to “search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (vv. 23–24).
Does he not suffer from the deep vacuum in his wicked heart, the empty cavernous chamber St. Augustine claims must be filled by God and God alone? “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”12
Has he so suppressed God’s gentle whisper to his heart that he no longer hears it?
When Dylann dies from execution, he will leave behind him a path lined with grieving loved ones, an existence littered with death, destruction, and the endless tears of his many victims.
God gave Dylann life and breath, stamping His own image onto him, and Dylann has wasted God’s gift, leaving a terrifying legacy, and dooming himself to the demons of hatred and hostility, debauchery and evil.13
I pray that God will help him before it is too late.