People; good and bad, forgiving or not

There will be many words spent on this. My heart goes out to those who have unexpectedly found themselves bereaved; the grief, the adjustment, the questioning and the sheer shock are not lightly to be passed over.

Those of us less personally touched (though for many of us the empathic response opens up our own sorrows to some degree), the big question is what really happened; how do we make sense of this? Perhaps there are helpful perspectives to guide our reflection in this article: In the midst of horror, be amazed at the goodness of the survivors | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer

I found this phrase interesting because it seemed to chime with one train of thought that I had: "in Bird's case, it does seem as though he was aware of what he was doing and made deliberated choices to follow the course he did. It is significant that he did not once seek help for his troubles; that he seemed to hoard his grudges and when the time came to let rip was fully prepared with a list of targets, a route, ammunition and guns. This was surely no moment of madness, but a long-held plan to settle scores, the final one being with himself, which was inevitable once he had murdered his twin brother."

If this is right, then it is an object lesson about forgiveness both in terms of its importance (ie the letting go of grudges) and what it discloses about the nature of forgiveness by contrast. Instead of the determined holding onto a 'right' to revenge and a settled disposition to harm, forgiveness is a forgoing of entitlement to retribution and moving away from a disposition to harm and towards a disposition to bless (probably via a more neutral attitude)...