Forgiveness

There were 33 shrines on the campus of Virginia Tech, lovingly built of flowers, letters, candles, photos and gifts. One for each of the 32 students and teachers who died April 16, and one for Seung-Hui Cho, who shot them all and then himself. At Cho's memorial, smaller than the others, there was a plastic bottle filled with flowers, cards and an American flag, according to New York Times reporter Christine Houser. One of the notes read, simply, "I forgive you." Another read: "Dear Cho. You are not excluded from our sorrow in death although you thought you were excluded from our love in life.

Writer needs a further look at scripturesIn the typically morally superior and biblical proof-texting fashion of the religious right, letter writer David A. Dilegge ("Quoting Bible, knowing its meaning are different," Jan. 3, The Sun in Howard) demonstrates not only his nearsighted and selective reading of the scriptures, but also his limited understanding of God's forgiving grace as taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the New Testament.By apparently suggesting that forgiveness is not warranted for the president because the assumption cannot be made that he will sin no more, Mr. Dilegge ignores the admonition of Jesus, "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged" (Matthew 7: 1)

From prison, Theodore J. Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty to the Unabomber killings, has a message for his brother, who turned him in to the government.In a book to be published this spring, Kaczynski says he could forgive what he calls his brother's treason. But forgiveness will come only if the brother, David Kaczynski, leaves his wife and joins with groups fighting modern society or, as Theodore himself did, lives in rural isolation."In this way he would not only earn my personal forgiveness; what is more important, he would be cleansed and redeemed of his treason against the values that he once held in common with me and many other people," Kaczynski writes.

WHEN the Group of Seven government leaders meet in Cologne, Germany, on Friday, beating back the Asian recession will be the foremost concern, followed by reconstruction in the Balkans.The $107 billion debt of the 700 million people in the 42 poorest nations will not loom large when the numbers involved in Japan's potential recovery are tossed about. This debt (including $7.8 billion to the International Monetary Fund, $38.6 billion to the World Bank and $6 billion to the United States) is the biggest problem only to the debtors.

WASHINGTON -- Delivering his most contrite public comments to date regarding his actions in the Monica Lewinsky matter, President Clinton asked for forgiveness from a group of Democratic supporters yesterday, saying he had let them down but hoped to redeem their trust."

PRETORIA, South Africa -- It stands knee-high, weighs nearly 18 pounds and was three years in the making. Now, three days before its formal release, the report of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is sparking a national furor as players in the apartheid battle scramble to clear their names in advance of a barrage of damaging findings.News reports said yesterday that the 3,500-page document would say President Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, among others, committed gross human rights abuses from 1960 to May 1994, the period covered by the commission's investigations.

ONE POSITIVE result of the White House scandal is the debate it has raised on the issue of forgiveness. The need to forgive and be forgiven is endlessly relevant in a world where even the just man may fall seven times, and "Pardon me" is akind of universal mantra.Though religions are often about guilt, they are also about forgiveness. All but one of the Koran's 114 chapters begin "In the name of God, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful." Though compassion and mercy do not necessarily include forgiveness, three of the Koran's 99 names for God pertain to forgiveness: Al-Ghaffar, Al-Ghafur, Al-Ghafir.

WILLIAM J. Bennett, America's self-styled voice of virtue, recently included me among those he believes are responsible for the "death of outrage" within the American public. Actually, over the years I have more frequently been criticized for displaying too much outrage over such deep-seated public wrongs as the war in Vietnam and the public immorality represented by allowing a fifth of America's children to be living in poverty.Moral outrageBut these and other political and social injustices do not seem to stir Mr. Bennett's sense of outrage as deeply as the personal sins of others.

WASHINGTON -- In his first reference to his personal troubles since his poorly received confession speech nearly two weeks ago, President Clinton told a friendly audience yesterday that he's "having to become quite an expert at this business of asking for forgiveness."But, in a speech from his vacation retreat on Martha's Vineyard commemorating the 35th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington, the president stopped short of actually asking for forgiveness or apologizing for his actions in the Monica Lewinsky matter.

A novel with no dialogue, no quotation marks? A strange concept, yet Bruce Fleming pulls it off in "Twilley" (Turtle Point Press. 334 pages. Paper. $14.95). A protagonist who could be Fleming himself (an Annapolitan and a Naval Academy faculty member) spends a circuitous day. He goes to a city department store; he is at lunch in his grandmother's small-town home; he is in a field; he is by the water. His grandmother does utter quoted words, mundanely then devastatingly."Twilley" is equal parts detailed noticing, wild imagining and good language.

First Sunday is a movie about forgiveness that asks its audience to forgive too much - with regard to both its characters and its makers. Set in Baltimore, with a few exteriors shot downtown, this uneven comedy plays a robbery and hostage-taking at a church for laughs, even when its supposedly sympathetic main character pulls a gun and seems plenty ready to use it. The movie is so confused about itself that it comes across as toneless, a bunch of characters...

Close your eyes and think of someone who has hurt you. Let all the anger, hurt and resentment you feel for that wrongdoer bubble to the surface. Seethe, shout, savor it. Feel your heart pounding, your blood boiling, your stomach churning and your thoughts racing in dark directions. OK, stop. Now, forgive your offender. Don't just shed the bitterness and drop the recrimination, but empathize with his plight, wish him well and move on - whether he's sorry or not. University of Wisconsin psychologist Robert D. Enright, the guru of what many are calling a new science of forgiveness, calls this final step "making a gesture of goodness" to a wrongdoer.

Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts, after a weekend of silence, chose to fall on his sword. He had been named as a steroid user in the Mitchell Report released by Major League Baseball last week, and though the evidence against him amounted to hearsay - the word of a former teammate - Roberts came forward with a confession. He had used steroids one time, he said. He knew it had been a mistake, and now all he could do was ask the public for forgiveness. He hoped, in time, that this would not define him. Aside from the four days he decided to stay silent, it was a textbook example of how marketing experts, image consultants and legal analysts say an athlete should respond to allegations that can define his legacy.

Wiping tears from her eyes, Lazara Arellano de Hogue apologized yesterday and begged for forgiveness from the parents of a child who was dragged to death beneath her pickup truck nearly a year ago. "From the first time I was told what happened, it has hurt me a lot because it's like he was a child of my own," the woman said through a Spanish-speaking interpreter at her sentencing hearing. "I want to go to the cemetery - to go on my knees to the grave to ask the child to forgive me." Relatives of 3-year-old Elijah Cozart expressed outrage at the request.

Just before dawn on Oct. 4, 2006, Enos Miller, an Amish man with a long gray beard, walked past the school where two of his granddaughters had been fatally shot two days before. A television reporter approached and asked him if he had forgiven the gunman. "In my heart, yes," said Miller, his voice wavering. "How is that possible?" she asked. His answer: "Through God's help." Miller's words - emblematic of the community's response to the tragedy - quickly became international news. How could the Amish so quickly forgive the man who killed five of their daughters and wounded five others?

There were 33 shrines on the campus of Virginia Tech, lovingly built of flowers, letters, candles, photos and gifts. One for each of the 32 students and teachers who died April 16, and one for Seung-Hui Cho, who shot them all and then himself. At Cho's memorial, smaller than the others, there was a plastic bottle filled with flowers, cards and an American flag, according to New York Times reporter Christine Houser. One of the notes read, simply, "I forgive you." Another read: "Dear Cho. You are not excluded from our sorrow in death although you thought you were excluded from our love in life.

Long before he sat in a Baltimore courtroom to hear the 60-year prison sentence, before he hugged his family and walked out to face reporters, even before police had arrested his son's killer, Gerald Jones had made his decision: He would forgive. In November 2005, Jones' 33-year-old son, Brian O'Neil Jones, was killed on a street in Canton. Brian Jones -- a husband, father of three, software engineer and volunteer high school basketball coach at Cardinal Gibbons -- was the victim of an apparently unprovoked shooting.

Thursday's paper presented an interesting juxtaposition of articles. The Sun's article on the report from the Iraq Study Group delineates the catastrophe created by the Bush administration in its baseless launching and bungled conduct of the Iraq war ("Time running out in Iraq, panel says," Dec. 7). As one who protested in Washington before and after the invasion of Iraq, I am part of a large group of Americans who has wanted to see justice done - which means no less than the impeachment of an executive who ignored the constitutional limits of his power and lied to the American public.

"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.

You do something offensive. You're sorry. You apologize. But sometimes, as Jennifer Thomas learned while trying to resolve a disagreement with her husband, simply saying, "I'm sorry," is not enough. "One day my husband and I were working though a conflict," says Thomas, a psychologist with Associates in Christian Counseling in Winston-Salem, N.C. "I said, `I'm sorry.' But he said I missed the mark; I wasn't sincere." Normally, says Thomas, she would have been miffed. But this time she was intrigued.