Quotes of the Day

Who didn't feel sympathy for the Rev. Julie Nicholson when she announced her resignation as parish priest of St. Aidan with St. George in Bristol, England, last week? The Anglican vicar lost her 24-year-old daughter Jenny in last July's London terrorist bombings. In a breathtakingly candid interview with the bbc, Nicholson said she was stepping down because she could not forgive the suicide bomber. "I rage that a human being could choose to take another human's life. I rage that someone should do this in the name of a god," she said.

But mixed in with compassion and understanding was a niggling sense that Nicholson had somehow failed. For Christians, forgiveness is, if not a spiritual duty, then at least a much-preached-about aspiration. Nicholson hinted at the conflict herself. "I have always been very in awe and humbled by those who stand up and say from a faith perspective, 'I forgive'," she said. But Nicholson decided that there are some things in life "unforgivable by the human spirit." So, she confessed, "it is very difficult for me to celebrate the Eucharist and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness, when I feel very far from that myself."

Forgiveness is wonderful and liberating and redemptive, of course. But it has almost become the standard these days. We used to hear about the power of forgiveness from the pulpit; now we get it as another word for moving on, the constant refrain of daytime talk shows and self-help books. Psychologists believe that forgiveness can heal deep trauma, but the concept has become so commonplace that everybody publicly asks for it, from Bill Clinton (for marital infidelity) to celebrities (for assorted addictions) to third-world countries (for debt). We've become so used to people forgiving that we're disappointed when they can't do it.

Occasionally, we do hear truly profound pleas for reconciliation: when Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in South Africa's apartheid prisons, he astonished the world by preaching liberation with forgiveness. But personally forgiving someone who has killed your loved one is one of the hardest things we can ever do. "Forgiveness doesn't come easily," says Piet Meiring, a professor of theology who was part of South Africa's postapartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc). "You can't organize forgiveness and you can't force someone to forgive. Microwave-oven forgiveness — where you just pop something in and bing! — that will never last."

Just take a look at the South African experience. The trc, a courtlike body open to victims and perpetrators of apartheid-era violence, held public hearings for more than two years in the mid-1990s. Intended as a compromise between a war-crimes trial and national "amnesia," the Commission, led by South Africa's confessor in chief Archbishop Desmond Tutu, offered possible amnesty for perpetrators willing to divulge all they knew, and dignity and reparations for victims. The trc is often hailed by non–South Africans as an unmitigated success. "It's almost embarrassing," says Meiring, who has traveled to places such as Rwanda and Sri Lanka to talk about his country's experience. "It seems that people think we found the perfect solution." Archbishop Tutu has recently been applying the lessons to the fractured society of Northern Ireland, where he hopes bringing victims and killers face-to-face in unofficial meetings shown on television can help break the stranglehold of hatred and recrimination.

Yet while Meiring says the trc was a vital part of "our healing" and "profoundly important in creating a new South Africa," he also recognizes that it was an extraordinarily painful process to many South Africans. A good portion of the country's whites considered the trc a witch hunt, and some blacks still resent the idea of amnesty. To work, the process requires certain prerequisites: near saintly leadership, a genuine commitment to uncover the truth, however ugly, behind crimes and "a sense that forgiveness is balanced by justice." Then, says Meiring, "the opportunity to look the perpetrators in the eye and understand something about their motives can make life easier."

Julie Nicholson will never have that opportunity. Part of the perversity of a suicide bombing is that the murderer dies along with the victims. There is no way to enact the justice that is an essential part of true forgiveness, no chance to dig beneath the logic of hatred to answer the fundamental question: "Why?" Perhaps that will make it impossible for Nicholson ever to forgive. But her decision to resign, like her interview last week, was first and foremost a rare show of honesty. Forgiveness, she reminds us, is not something you can turn on like a tap. At its purest, setting both victim and antagonist free, it is truly a miraculous gift.

• SIMON ROBINSON
• A soul in search of magnanimity reminds us how hard the struggle is