An address by Revd Dr Sam Wells

I envisage forgiveness as part of a twelve-step process as follows.

  1. Resolve
  2. Ceasefire
  3. Account
  4. Apology
  5. Penance
  6. Agreement
  7. Repentance
  8. Confession
  9. Forgiveness
  10. Reconciliation
  11. Healing
  12. Resurrection

Forgiveness is part of a larger process that we could call making peace. That process would normally need to include all these elements, but not necessarily in this order. Harm can be caused, the process may be inhibited, perhaps stalled, and the whole field be brought into discredit if elements from the later stages are attempted or insisted upon before vital earlier stages have been cleared. Forgiveness comes as late as stage 9 for good reason: first harm needs to cease, truth needs to be told, apology made, trust established, recompense attempted. There’s no doubt forgiveness is for some an act of will or even habit; but if such stages have not been gone through, it may be that forgiveness has been based on fragile foundations and will later come to be regretted, withdrawn or recanted. Likewise asking for reconciliation in the absence of major progress on the foregoing stages is like condemning the cry of rage without understanding its cause. In both cases one is entering a story without attending to where the story started.

What this twelve-stage model makes explicit is the specifically theological dimensions of the process. On the one hand the model offers a way to distinguish between those stages we might perceive as generic to all forms of peacebuilding, and those that we might regard as distinctively Christian. Stages 1-6 require no explicit theological narration. That’s not to say that they don’t have potential theological dimensions. But they can make transparent sense outside the language of the church and the Christian story. Stages 7-10 are different: they are explicitly Christian notions, albeit ones that find parallels in some other traditions. The fact, for example, that in Roman Catholicism and in more liturgical Protestant denominations confession usually comes near the beginning of the Eucharist is a statement of an assumption that Christians are always in a process of making peace, and that reconciliation always involves one in naming and disentangling oneself from one’s own complicity in provoking and promoting disorder. Stages 11-12 are different again: whereas 1-6 are prudent actions that Christians may see as being led by the Spirit, and 7-10 involve specific Christian practices that seek to imitate the ways of the Trinity, 11-12 are acts of God, in which the Holy Spirit makes present the benefits of Christ’s ministry – eschatological signs that invite us to glimpse on earth how things are in heaven as a foretaste of what God has prepared.

It’s important to state that there are circumstances in which it is almost impossible to make any progress through the stages of this peace process: for example when there’s a huge disparity of power and the powerful party is inflicting regular hurt and damage upon another party without provocation. In such a case employing the language for the second half of the process – forgiveness, for example – is almost always wholly inappropriate.

It’s time to look at the twelve stages in more detail.

  1. Conflict takes over people’s lives. It can invigorate, energise and captivate; yet it ultimately narrows, impoverishes and depletes. To emerge from conflict requires each party to perceive or reassert a sense of its own respective identity that’s not subsumed within the conflict – of a sense of purpose or vocation that isn’t locked into primal enmity with its adversary. In vernacular terms, it’s the moment when a critical friend says, ‘You’re bigger than this,’ or, ‘You may want to shoot them all, but they’re not worth the bullets.’ This may well be a matter of resolve. It could be an evaluation of costs and benefits. It could even be an act of desperation, in the face of losing the battle or losing everything else of value in the process of continuing to try to win the battle.Peace may not begin here. But beginning with resolve and identity highlights the way conflict can become like an addiction – a suit of clothes that it becomes impossible to imagine oneself outside of, and yet a pattern of behaviour and state of antagonism that sooner or later, whether of one’s own or another’s making, are revealed to be a prison. To escape that prison may involve reaching back to a time before things were like this, or forward to a future when they might no longer be like this, or across to lives of others that are not submerged in conflict like this. Whichever it is, it’s about saying, ‘This is not fundamentally who I am.’
  1. While it’s seldom the case in all-out war, particularly of the political and social kind, one inhibitor to initiating a process of peace can be denial that there is any serious conflict that needs addressing. As Hiram Johnson (or was it Aeschylus?) said, the first casualty of war is truth: but that can mean denying there is a war in the first place. Among the first steps to making peace is to say, ‘We are enemies,’ and recognise the tragedy, grief and failure of that. From there it’s sometimes possible to say, ‘I don’t believe this condition represents the best intentions of either of us.’ And then, building on the step above, to say, ‘This condition is bringing out the worst in us, and if I don’t like what it is turning me into, I can’t believe you’re enjoying what it’s turning you into.’From there, the next step is the cessation of active hostility. That doesn’t necessarily mean the abandonment of hatred, the lapse of grievance or the end of anger, but it does mean no more acts that perpetuate conflict, war or violence. It may be possible to achieve a ceasefire. It may be necessary to call upon the intervention or interposition of a third party to separate the parties and divert attention from the object of fury. In some cases, after much heart-searching, recognition of humiliation, and honesty about the realities and prospects, there may be an instance of outright surrender. Whichever it is, it involves a recognition that nothing else can start unless this stops.
  1. Love keeps no score of wrongs. Hatred and enmity certainly do. Whether it be sectarian antagonism in the Balkans or a poisonous marriage, the nursing of resentments and the memory of victimhood can envelop almost the whole story of the past. At an early stage in the process of peace an attempt must be begun to articulate a truthful story. If that story begins with all the responsibility on one set of shoulders, it probably hasn’t gone back early enough. Using the definitions outlined earlier, the story needs to go back at least as far as the surfacing of tension, whether that initially be benign, understandable, or malign. (Again the power differential may have a crucial part to play here.)As the story takes shape, and the resentments and bitterness of each party are blended in like eggs and flour into a mixing bowl, it may begin to be possible to articulate that there have been shortcomings and bad faith on both sides. Even those that unequivocally believe in the justice of their cause may be able to recognise that they have not always pursued that cause in the most gracious and respectful way. Once both parties have set aside the insistence on settling the question of who started it in favour of the determination to answer the question of how to stop it, it may begin to be possible to accept mixed motives, exaggerated responses, hasty judgements, excessive demonisation and false assumptions.
  1. What turns this emerging story into a new form of action and reaction is an apology. An apology is a form of words that expresses both acknowledgement of responsibility, without resort to mitigating excuse, and genuine sorrow not simply for the significant hurt and the irreplaceable damage but also for the wrong intention that brought about such hurt and damage.Acknowledgement of responsibility means that ‘I regret that you were offended’ is not an apology; ‘I hurt you’ is. That responsibility should not be offset by excuses: stage 3 allows space for a story to be told that offers context for rash, cruel and regrettable actions; this is the time not for context or mitigation, but for unambiguous admission of guilt. ‘I did it’: in many cases, simple as that. ‘Sorry’ is necessary but not sufficient: the sorrow must be genuine and tangible, based on a real, if not comprehensive, understanding of the harm done. That harm is of three kinds. There is intangible hurt – grief, pain, humiliation, shame, sadness, loss – which may be deep and long lasting, but may not be permanent; there is damage, the disfigured body, lost relative, destroyed possessions that abide after any healing of hurt has taken place; and there is the malevolent will that meant such hurt and damage was no accident or unfortunate collateral result but an actively sought and rigorously pursued plan. ‘Everything in me wanted to kill you and I took pride in the damage I did.’ That’s more like it.
  1. In practice an apology can go some way to address the intangible hurt and pain. But it cannot make much impact on the tangible damage and loss, nor can it alone alleviate the power of the evil intention. ‘It’s all very well to say sorry, but…’ is the response that identifies these distinctions. A penance serves two purposes. It can show awareness of the degree of damage inflicted, by seeking to offer tangible recompense whose character is consistent with or at least relevant to the object in question. The point is not to aspire to full and comprehensive restitution, let alone compensatory reparation on top of that. To make such an attempt is to risk self-delusion that one can expunge one’s guilt by tangible payment. Instead, the intention is to demonstrate to the victim that one understands the quality of what has been lost, if not fully in degree, then at least in kind. Penance is a gesture, not a due.The second dimension of penance is to make a personal journey to acknowledge just how perverted one’s intention was when one set out to inflict so much hurt and damage. ‘I don’t know what came over me’ isn’t enough. ‘I have taken steps to understand what led me to such a course of action’ is better. Penance refers to those steps. Again, they may be a gesture, rather than a full appraisal. But they are an important gesture. If one was part of a viral national movement, how was one so easily seduced? If one was trying to belong or to impress, why did one not seek a better vision? If one was obeying orders, what steps was one making to alleviate the negative effects of one’s actions? Trying to address such questions is a form of penance.
  1. Some of the above stages are ‘soft’ or difficult to expose to public accountability, being interpersonal or highly contextual. In some ways stages 1, 2, 4 and 5 map much of the territory that distinguishes the articulation of an agreement from simply instigating a ceasefire. To begin to live differently, to practice habits outside the strictures and stringencies of conflict, requires confidence that the conflagration is not going to reignite at any moment, given that a number of trigger factors are doubtless still in play.That confidence requires, at least, a written or similarly understood agreement about how things will be from now on, endeavouring to avert the circumstances and discourage the behaviours that gave rise to the conflict. It’s seldom enough to appreciate that all parties want to ‘move on’ or at least stop fighting; for they may be taking away very different expectations of what ‘normal’ might mean. And it’s rarely adequate to say ‘This will not happen again’ without naming the motivations, flash-points and actions that make a recurrence almost inevitable. If peace begins at stage 1 with resolve to live in a bigger story, it gains traction at stage 6 with an outline of what the minimum conditions of living in an alternative story might include.
  1. At this point the process of peace turns explicitly towards the language of the church. Repentance is somewhat like the moment in a twelve-step recovery programme where one admits that one has lost control of one’s life, that the hatred has become unmanageable, and that one has become powerless to stop the conflict on one’s own. In other words repentance is an admission that an apology, which suggests an out-of-character misstep, is not enough, because the truth is, one is addicted to conflict and violence. It’s a recognition that, without God’s help, one’s own sustained resolution, and a supportive community, there’s no hope of breaking the cycle of dependence.Repentance doesn’t make much sense without stage 3 – telling a truthful story. In some cases it isn’t even appropriate – if, for example, that truthful story discloses that the conflict is rooted in intimidating discrepancies of power and the oppression of one party by another. A person who is the victim of an unprovoked assault does not need to repent. But most stories are not so clear cut. Even in cases where it may seem clear that one party is the aggressor, or in other forms the perpetrator or initiator, once a truthful story is told it may become easier to acknowledge that all parties have changes to make. Few people are wholly innocent of a pattern of allowing tensions to become malign and thus descending into conflict. And repentance includes the commitment to take every step to ensure such a course of action never comes about again.
  1. To say ‘I’m sorry. I messed up’ is usually helpful and constructive. But it’s seldom adequate. Confession ideally includes recognition of culpability and genuine remorse. More fully than apology, it enters into an empathetic understanding of what it must be like to be in the other party’s or parties’ shoes, and what the story looks like if shorn of the justifying narrative that motivated the perpetrator. It is a genuine attempt to be full and final, and thus it should seek to be an exhaustive articulation of specific acts of wrongdoing. Such an account may take some time to compile, and the process of recording those discrete acts is part of the process – often a cathartic one.Confession would normally be a private act, for example between a penitent and a priest, or in some cases between a perpetrator and a victim, or between two or more parties to a conflict. But in some circumstances, such as a truth and reconciliation process, confession may take place in public. Again the above sequence of stages isn’t comprehensive or normative, but it is seldom appropriate to expect confession of this kind early in the process. It is utterly humiliating, and like any kind of humiliation, if is not voluntarily undertaken and offered in a context of trust, it is likely to generate bitterness that will provoke subsequent conflict.
  1. Forgiveness is notoriously something that cannot be rushed, imposed, required, or simulated. In some ways it is a gift bestowed by the Holy Spirit and not something a person can generate for themselves, however penitent their former adversary. But forgiveness in many cases also involves an act of will. Thus in this sense forgiveness is a decision by one or more parties not to be defined by resentment or antagonism, to seek a bigger life than one constantly overshadowed by this painful story, and to allow one’s perception of the harm received no longer to stand in highlighted isolation but to blend slowly into the myriad of wrongs and griefs to which the world has been subject across time. It is the letting-go of the longing to have a better past.Just as peace begins when one or more parties seek to find or rediscover an identity that’s not consumed by fixation on prevailing in conflict, so at this crucial stage peace pivots on whether the injured party or parties are, in thought, emotion and will, able to let go of the uniqueness of what they have suffered and what has been done to them and allow it to join the stream of wrong that constitutes the disorder of the world. Forgiveness is a gift when it happens not so much as a decision but as the lifting of a burden or the removal of a mask – something brought about by the Holy Spirit rather than by conscious, deliberate effort. It is not to be confused with forgetting. It is the permitting of an artist to work the slash in the painting into a yet more textured, if not more conventionally perfect, artwork than the original.
  1. Reconciliation means seeing a future in active relationship with the one who has perpetrated so much harm; not to sustain life by keeping out of their way or erecting impenetrable fences, but to believe and discover that the former enemy has part of the key to one’s own flourishing and that, without that key, one will remain in some sense still in the prison of hatred. Ideally reconciliation means turning an enemy into an ally; perhaps even a friend.Conflict is many grievous things, but perhaps most simply it is a waste – a waste of energy, of life, sometimes, of time, money, talent, resources, hope. Centrally it is a waste of relationship: difference that could issue in creative partnership or rewarding companionship is perverted and turned into a pretext for destructive struggle. Reconciliation is the miracle by which the energies that have been put to malign purposes are now channelled to building understanding, forging wisdom, and establishing trust. The ideal is that one day a person can say, ‘You know, I could never be glad for what happened, but without it we would never have come to this better place together.’
  1. The last two stages are gifts of the Holy Spirit rather than results of human endeavour or will. Genuine healing means finding oneself in a place where one can say, ‘I am a wiser, deeper, better person than I would have been had all this not have happened. I still bear the scars, but, like Jesus’ scars on Easter Day, those wounds are an indication of glory, a sign of love, and an emblem of peace.’ Healing is not about reversing the hurt or damage, dismantling the pain or eradicating the loss; it’s about realising one’s life is no longer dominated by enmity, discovering wisdom and relationship that would not otherwise have been so, and perceiving in this benighted period a source of compassion, dignity and hope. This is more than resilience. It is more like the restoration of the broken and despoiled as a gift.
    Needless to say few resolutions of conflict reach such a stage. But this is an account of peace, rather than of the cessation of conflict. Peace is a much richer notion that simply the absence of war. Part of its mystery is its capacity to take the malign elements that go into fuelling war and transform them into the ingredients of mutual flourishing. That process is called healing.
  1. Resurrection is, finally, the goal of salvation and the end of a peace process. And in naming the goal of salvation and of a peace process as resurrection, we disclose that salvation and a peace process are ultimately the same thing. Salvation is a peace process. A peace process is the seeking of salvation. Here lies the crucial point. Our engagement in a peace process and God’s saving resurrection of Jesus are different in degree but not in kind. Engaging in the process of peace is the fundamental way we imitate the saving work of God in Christ. It is not that we know what resurrection looks like and peace is a helpful analogy of that resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus – in its immediate sense of the body raised after crucifixion, and in its wider sense of the forgiveness, resurrection and healing that are recorded in the post-resurrection gospel accounts, is precisely an account of what peace entails. Peace is, in the end, resurrection.

I believe that every Christian is called to be a missionary. To be a missionary is to be engaged in one or more stages of this process, bringing people into reconciliation with God, themselves, one another and the creation.