From Chechnya to UK

This story involves violations that I can only imagine and shudder at and so I am wary. To rework a stock phrase, "tread carefully for you tread on my hurt". Nevertheless I have set myself the task of learning from such experiences and as a no-longer young adult my learning is most effectively done by matching it up with my own learning so far and so my own questions, experience and observations.

Camilla writes: " I will never forgive the act, yet I can forgive the man who raped me" and I find this intriguing and suggestive. Intriguing because it raises for me the question of what we mean by forgiveness. It alerts me to the fact that we seem to operate with a number of definitions not all of which seem helpful or even truly about forgiveness when they are thought through further. What is the difference between forgiving and act and forgiving a person? Apart form grammatical considerations about verbal transitivity! I shall hazard a guess: forgiving an act is about either or both of forgetting it and/or discounting it. Forgiving a person for Camilla seems to be about excusing and understanding and so being able to [re-]create a bond of affirming relationship with the perpetrator [an echo of the idea that to understand all is to forgive all?] -to make reconciliation possible.

And/but for her, clearly forgiveness has a dimension which is about the forgiver finding a sense of inner peace: "I believe forgiveness begins with understanding, but you have to work through layers to obtain it. First you have to deal with anger, then with tears, and only once you reach the tears are you on the road to finding peace of mind.".
I value this because it chimes with my own experience that forgiving is a journey/process of understanding the hurt, the magnitude of the hurt the injustice, the anger ... I wonder whether this needs to be the case because only if we understand what needs to be 'let go' can we actually let go and forgive.

Jon writes: "Like Camilla I’ve come to an understanding of where our captors, and where her violator, were coming from. Not many people in this world do stuff out of pure maliciousness." This 'understanding' is important; I'm still wondering whether it is forgiveness or excusing -in the case of forgivness there is arecognition that a wrong has been committed whereas in excusing we recognise that while something nasty has happened, there is no blame. At a simple level excusing would be letting someone off a blow to the head because you recognised that they did it because they had tripped up and put out their hand to steady themself and it had connected with your head quite simply by accident not design. Forgiving would be letting them off because they did it by design perhaps out of anger or even because they wanted to hurt you.

But this latter scenario maybe helps to connect with Jon's thought for deeply: it is easier, in my experience to forgive when we can understand why something was done and when we understand that it wasn't done with malice than when we understand [rightly or wrongly] that it was done with malice. The malice or lack of care is the hardest to forgive; it is personal. The former is somewhat akin to excusing in that we gain an understanding and we don't take it personally. Perhaps there is a continuum: excusing-understanding-forgiving.