I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
—MARY OLIVER
The raw stone walls and the blue light filtering through stained-glass windows made the chapel a cave-like sanctuary. I often went to the small Episcopal monastery of the Cowley Fathers to find a space of silence in the day. It was the only place I could find, aside from the library where the smell of book mold was unpleasant, that offered some respite from the urban clamor of Cambridge and from Harvard’s departmental politicking. It wasn’t just the silence that drew me. I took pleasure in being there during the prayers and liturgy too, which is how I one day found myself standing next to a small, elderly black man who turned to me when it came time to offer the exchange, “Peace be with you.” His face and his twinkling grin were familiar, but given the slightly incongruous tracksuit he was wearing I couldn’t quite place him. Then he introduced himself with the humility of consummate understatement, “I’m Tutu. I used to be the archbishop of Cape Town.”
We chatted after the service. My maroon robes were familiar to him and he laughed gleefully remembering his meetings with the Dalai Lama. The other Nobel laureates could keep their gravitas; these two provoked each other to a silly goofiness. I learned he was in the United States on sabbatical and would be teaching at the Episcopal Divinity School about his experience with South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process. As it happened, I was already taking the course there, which was co-taught by the renowned feminist theologian Reverend Carter Heyward.
Sometimes teachers appear without fanfare or mystery, without even much of a personal connection, but simply taking their place at the front of a classroom, talking about what they have come to know. However mundane and institutional the framing, the lessons may still be profound, and the teacher’s presence still a living embodiment of the lesson. When that presence shines with such offhand humility as Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s, it’s a good reminder that no one here is especially unique.
In class, Tutu spoke of the challenges he faced as the head of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the abuses of the apartheid regime that had held power through legalized cruelty, humiliation, and violence both secretive and blatant, as well as the answering violence that the anti-apartheid movement was eventually driven to. When Nelson Mandela, as the former prisoner and new president of a country that was emerging from what amounted to a negotiated revolution, invited his jailer to his inauguration as a guest of honor, he set the tone for a stunning invitation to forgiveness. When Mandela asked Tutu to lead the commission, his choice was an acknowledgment that the work that needed to be done was spiritual as well as political, legal, and psychological. The commission’s mandate was not to punish the perpetrators but to promote healing, both on an individual and societal level, of the wounds inflicted by a racist and unjust system. Their task was to begin to reconcile a divided country where blacks and whites had lived for generations as oppressed and oppressors, and had been driven to the brink of civil war. Now that the tables had turned, the black majority held democratically elected power for the first time, but the wounds were deep and still very raw. The fear was that a wave of violent retribution would undo the precarious moral victory.
Given the goal of reconciliation, the commission needed to avoid revenge disguised as victor’s justice or the rigidity of the normal criminal justice process that, given the scale of the offenses, would be so painfully prolonged that it would forestall healing. A blanket amnesty that would have left the culture of impunity unshaken was also rejected. The commission devised a process that focused first on truth-telling, gathering some twenty thousand statements where both victims and perpetrators attested to abductions, killings, torture, and other gross violations of human rights. Roughly one in ten of those were invited to give testimony at public hearings with saturated media coverage. Those perpetrators who offered a full confession, which was then verified, were granted amnesty. A system of reparations for the victims was also established.
The intended purpose of the truth-telling was accountability, an antidote to the secrecy and repression of the apartheid regime’s police state. The public airing of the stories also offered a profound catharsis, a restoration of dignity, and closure for grieving families who until then had been unable to learn how their loved ones had disappeared, or to bury their dead. Most striking of all, and a surprise to many, was how the truth-telling kindled an impulse to forgiveness. When a person confesses a painful truth, expresses remorse, and is heard, the acts of speaking and hearing have a power to forge bonds of heartfelt human connection.
Forgiveness was not a universal response to the truth-telling. For many it was out of reach, and it certainly could not be taken for granted. And yet that transformation was surprisingly common. Time and again, there was a remarkable showing of the strength that inheres within human vulnerability.
The systematic program of torture, killing, and humiliation that enforced apartheid required that the perpetrators see their opponents as less than human. The racism that was apartheid’s rationale only amplified that dehumanization. In the process the enforcers themselves were dehumanized by their own brutality. When a perpetrator finds the empathy to take a victim’s perspective and feel remorse, they have taken the first step on a journey that can restore their own humanity. The victim’s impulse to forgive is a meeting halfway on that journey. By exercising the power to accept that offering of remorse, a victim reclaims their own agency and the dignity that was stripped from them. At that meeting point, the humanity that was damaged on both sides begins to heal.
While listening to Tutu describe the heartrending encounters that the commission’s framework had enabled, it became clear that forgiveness was not just a fluffy sentimental notion, but a life-changing tool that could move relationships toward reconciliation. I was struck by the intricate mesh between such personal moments of spiritual transformation and the larger public project of restorative justice as a remedy for a traumatized society. Most surprising of all, forgiveness was in some unlikely sense scalable; it had a role in policy. Obviously, you couldn’t compel it, and you couldn’t allow it to justify abuse or let harm stand without correction. But perhaps you could create the conditions and space for forgiveness, the catalysts that would promote this healing chemistry.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Tutu led was far from a complete or flawless solution for South Africa’s needs. Now, two decades later, it has been criticized especially for the inadequacy of reparations that failed to correct systemic inequalities. But it was a remarkably effective response to the uncertainties and urgent needs of the time. After the commission had wrapped up its work, Tutu traveled to Rwanda, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine to share the lessons the commission had learned. It could serve as a model, although not in every detail because they were learning as they went along, and because the process as designed was finely tuned to the specific conditions of the time and place.
Nelson Mandela once said that if Tutu had not been involved, the truth and reconciliation process would have failed miserably. The archbishop clearly brought extraordinary personal and spiritual resources to bear on that moment of history. I don’t think that age diminished the man I came to admire. His very presence seemed evidence that Tutu had the balance of contemplative and active life down to an art. His energy seemed to spring from a bottomless source, and was fully charged whether he was addressing a crowd or in the quiet of a private meeting. He talked about how he had been looking forward to retirement, expecting to celebrate the end of apartheid with a time of hard-earned rest, only to be summoned to more than two intense years of high-stakes work that would daily drain the emotional resources of all involved. Even when that was over he hardly paused. During his so-called sabbatical in the United States, he was still down in the dirt, fighting for gay and lesbian rights, for indigenous people’s rights in Canada and the United States, and for Palestinian rights at a time when very few were willing to risk raising their voices.
Though he expressed himself passionately in a very strong voice, I never heard any shadow of resentment cross that voice. He wasn’t shy to speak in anger, but the fires of his anger burned clean. They didn’t seem to be fueled by his own personal suffering or any grudge. It is rare to meet anger that carries no taint of hate, no effort to dehumanize a target, and that fascinated me. I’m convinced that his energy, and his capacity for forgiveness, are gifts that flow from his contemplative practice.
Prayer, and his daily celebration of the Eucharist, seemed the most natural of disciplines. Prayer was for him a discipline in the sense that eating and bathing regularly are acts of discipline. He didn’t elevate his spiritual practice above anything else in his daily routine, but he would not have neglected it any more than he would abandon any other basic task of living.
There is a deeper discipline to contemplative life that Tutu embodied as well. The daily repetition of formal practice—be it prayer or meditation or any contemplative exercise of the mind and heart—is a way of building a skill. The purpose of the repetition is to internalize the skills so thoroughly that they kick in automatically when we need them. We put the practice into practice. The fruits of that kind of discipline manifest most obviously when things go wrong. How we respond to adversity is the measure of how deeply integrated our practice is. The ability to forgive those who have harmed us, genuinely and generously, is a test passed with flying colors.
Forgiveness receives far less attention in Buddhism than it does in Christianity, where so much flows from the idea of God’s forgiveness of humans’ sins. The Buddha taught that the karmic consequences of wrongdoing—or doing good—are simply effects that arise from causes. Our actions lay down imprints in our stream of consciousness that form tendencies and have impacts beyond the immediately obvious. The chain of cause and effect may be as subtle and difficult to track as the currents from the butterfly wings that set off a tornado on the other side of the earth. Or the harm we cause may be obvious—and available to our remorse and efforts at correction. There is no judgment in the Christian sense, no divine retribution, only the workings of a natural law. Tradition and custom have laid down pathways: We confess harmful actions, express remorse, and ask for forgiveness of the teacher or of enlightened beings. There is a ritual in the monastic community for dealing with transgressions that break vows, where the superior council acknowledges your remorse and may advise on a course correction. But there is oddly little emphasis on asking forgiveness of a person you have harmed, or offering forgiveness to someone who has harmed you, and I had not given it much thought before Tutu’s example centered the idea in my mind.
There is one very well-known story from the Buddha’s life where forgiveness is a crucial theme, though hardly spelled out. Angulimala was an infamous highway brigand, a killer who set himself to the grisly task of collecting one finger from each of a thousand victims. He stole nothing else from them, but strung the severed fingers into a necklace that he wore around his neck. By the time he crossed paths with the Buddha, he had already taken 999 lives, compelled whole villages to be abandoned in fear, and caused untold suffering. Instead of becoming the thousandth victim, the Buddha invited him—fearlessly, calmly, and without anger—to stop killing and terrorizing, and to become a monk. Instead of turning Angulimala in to the authorities, the Buddha ordained him, to the community’s extreme consternation. When he joined the monks on begging rounds and people recognized him and stoned him, his only reaction was to ask for forgiveness. And, to the surprise of his fellow monks, his enlightenment came swiftly.
The Buddha saw the particular efficacy of a solution that sheltered the criminal within the community rather than ostracizing him, however shocking that seemed both to the families of his victims and to the other monks. And no doubt the Buddha also saw that the other monks had something to learn from the situation. Of course, the gesture could have failed. The story would be remembered differently if, after being ordained, Angulimala had chopped off a fellow monk’s finger. There was something about the Buddha’s fearless acceptance, his unflinching forgiveness, that created an opportunity for a villain to recall his better self and begin a transformation. It’s not that Angulimala’s change was instantaneous and miraculous. The story makes no claim that a miracle was involved, beyond the strangely unbounded nature of human potential.
As a civic society today, we lack the gestures and the vocabulary, institutionally and otherwise, to offer forgiveness and invite the transformation that it enables. We may take pride in standing up against capital punishment, but we don’t have the courage to embrace and accept convicted criminals as individuals and honor their potential as human beings. We may warm to a story of redemption when Hollywood has processed it for us, but we haven’t designed our penal system with redemption as a possibility, let alone a goal. For want of a practical map that centers the restoration of human dignity, we have abdicated our own role in constituting the community that could provide a healing environment. The result is the profit-driven gulag that is mass incarceration in the United States today.
There is a practical role for forgiveness in the criminal justice system, not just from individuals but from society as a whole. Europe has begun to explore methods of restorative justice that turn away from punitive vengeance and give priority instead to a victim’s restitution and a criminal’s rehabilitation. The criminal remains first and foremost a human being, and a measure of success is when that human being is assimilated back into society as a normal citizen. In the United States, a felon is branded for life, shutting the door to many opportunities that would support rehabilitation. It’s a twisted, vengeful form of justice for a nation that claims “in God we trust.” It’s particularly hellish for many whom the legal system has failed with wrongful convictions that destroy innocent lives.
When a society tries to rebuild itself after suffering trauma on a national scale, like South Africa and others that have worked with truth and reconciliation processes after the anguish of a civil war or a revolution, there is a need for legal frameworks that include forgiveness on an institutional as well as an individual level. It would be well for the United States to acknowledge its own traumatic history of slavery and genocide, and consider the need for a process that makes forgiveness and healing possible. Amnesty should not be just a rubber stamp that allows someone who plays by the rules to get off scot-free. It should instead offer a path for an individual who has done harm to become a better human being.
In a complex human environment, asking and giving forgiveness are essential behavioral tools that can move beyond shame and remorse to enable healing. Forgiveness seems a natural complement to the core Buddhist practices that cultivate compassion and loving-kindness. When we practice extending compassion equally in all directions—to those we love, to those we feel neutral toward, and to those we perceive as our enemies—forgiveness is a missing link in the exercise. In practical terms, we need to forgive those who have harmed us or who seem hateful to us before we can genuinely feel compassion or loving-kindness toward them. In the absence of forgiveness, generating goodwill toward those from whom we instinctively recoil remains a brittle, cerebral game, or else a transactional calculation of return.
The purpose of such practices is not just a flexing of the heart muscles that will make compassion and loving-kindness arise more spontaneously, but also a leveling of our natural biases. Of course it’s easier to extend our hearts to an inner circle of friends and family. We are biologically programmed to do so. It’s much more challenging to embrace strangers with equal warmth. If we can learn to see our erstwhile enemies through the same lens of compassion and love, we will be loosening our tight claw hold on the illusion that our enemies are made of different stuff than ourselves, or that anyone is inherently an enemy. At the same time, we will have made a concrete step toward dismantling the tribalism that plagues the human race.
The instant we identify someone as an enemy, the psychology of bias runs predictable scripts in our minds. What until then was a neutral figure, not fully defined and still open to interpretation, hardens into a two-dimensional caricature, its outlines penned thick and black, isolating it from context. We see a villain, unchanging and irredeemable, rather than a complex human being, fallible and perhaps terribly flawed but with the potential to change and grow. In the reinforced bubbles of lives submerged in media, that psychology of bias is further exaggerated. The adversary becomes a narcissist or a sociopath, hell-bent on destroying our world. We are roiled to defend ourselves against alien rapists or vile racists. Or perhaps we congratulate ourselves that we have a more sophisticated view. We recognize that the evil adversary is systemic, rooted in history, a tangled web of past causes and current incentives. But when we are under attack, in the adrenaline-charged moment it’s hard to hold all that complexity aloft. We compress and abbreviate to sight a target, and once again we are tilting full speed ahead at a caricature.
In our eagerness to right wrongs, we project our own flaws in ways that sabotage the work of compassion and social justice. Subtle investments of ego cling to our most idealistic efforts and undermine them. However discreetly, we see ourselves as heroes and saviors. We wear haloes under our hats. Always, we are in the driver’s seat. We charge ahead to meet the enemy, but as long as our own minds are clouded and agitated, we inevitably fog the lens. We not only see more chaos in the world, we contribute to it. That filter means we don’t even get an accurate diagnosis of the problems, whether inside us or out in the world, to be able to change effectively.
Here is where learning to be nonjudgmental shows its true value, though its meaning in Buddhism has so often been misunderstood in the West. Being nonjudgmental does not mean giving up discernment. It does not mean ignoring injustice, cozying up to corruption, or viewing the complexities of an ethical gray scale through fluffy pink clouds. In Buddhist terms, being nonjudgmental was originally part of training to suspend one’s own projections and biases. The goal was never to turn a blind eye, but to see more clearly without distortion. Here too forgiveness may have a role to play, because it demands that we see the darkness clearly before moving toward reconciliation. The truth portion of “truth and reconciliation” cannot be skipped. There can be no genuine forgiveness, or any other correction, without first acknowledging that something was wrong. Nor does forgiving mean forgetting. Holding in memory the truth of harm done is crucial to preventing that harm from being repeated, but we can forgive even as we say, “Never again!”
If we really want to change the world, transforming ourselves—recognizing that we too are part of that world—is a necessary part of getting the job done. We share others’ faults in ways that are hard for us to see ourselves. This is not an argument for quietism, spiritual bypassing, or accepting wrongdoing passively. Nor is contemplative practice a luxury or indulgence as popular notions of self-care sometimes suggest. Contemplative practice is essential nourishment that fuels the active life. The familiar tension that pits Martha against Mary, the one who serves actively against the contemplative, is a false binary. There is a powerful synergy between those two ways of being in the world, and each can fail without the other. Any kind of contemplative discipline that begins to shift your heart and mind can unlock a reservoir of motivation, compassion, and wisdom to channel where it is needed. Without that inner work, rage against the injustice of the world and fatigue at the never-ending nature of the task make a toxic mix that leads to burnout and sours compassion into cynicism. If you truly begin to change yourself, it becomes much easier to change the world around you, and to do so without throwing even more anger and divisiveness into the stew.
And yet, an essential part of what it takes to transform ourselves is the desire to transform the world: If one wishes to have inner peace one must first pray for peace in the four directions. We cannot sit quietly and pray in a burning house. An individual who seeks inner peace has a spiritual responsibility to create the conditions for peace in the world. If the conflagration of the world’s suffering does not move us to compassion, then the spiritual path will wind in circles around us and lead nowhere.
The redemptive forgiveness that Archbishop Tutu hoped to awaken in his terribly damaged country was conceived as a mirror of God’s forgiveness of humankind’s sins, because his Christian faith is anchored in the idea that all of humanity is created in God’s image. A Buddhist might point instead to the essential Buddha nature that every sentient being possesses—the potential that exists in all conscious life to awaken into an unclouded view of reality, to see the truth of our infinitely interrelated existence. The stories we weave, the mechanisms we conceive, are fundamentally different, but they point to the same underlying reality. If you can keep in sight that promise of the redemptive potential of our very existence, the hard work of forgiveness and healing becomes easier.