SOUL FOOD:

Change everything. Love and forgive. That is the message of the Fetzer Institute’s Campaign for Love & Forgiveness.

I spent the last week at the annual conference of the Religion Newswriters Assn., held this year across the street from the Alamo at the historic Menger Hotel in downtown San Antonio. Big on the agenda were matters of faith and politics and also love and forgiveness.

Since we’re facing a presidential election in 2008, the focus on faith and politics came as no surprise. But the spotlight on love and forgiveness was unexpected — not that the two aren’t closely tied to faith.

Nearly every religious tradition teaches both as highly desirable, often necessary, virtues. They are at the heart of the Jewish High Holy Days that concluded 12 days ago.

Jesus told his disciples, “If you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” Theologians and preachers count this uncompromising proposition among Jesus’ so-called “hard sayings.”

During the month of Ramadan, which Muslims are now observing, they are expected to forgive those who have done them wrong. At a web site dedicated to Islamic information, www.soundvision.com, a staff writer lists “forgive everyone who has hurt you” as one of 10 Ramadan goals.

“Let go of the anger and pain,” the writer instructs, “forgive those who have hurt you. Forgiving someone is not only good for the body, but it’s also great for the soul.”

During the six years I have been writing this column, I have written about forgiveness more than a dozen times. Often it has been in the context of the Jewish High Holy Days, Islam’s Ramadan, or the Orthodox Christian Sunday of Forgiveness.

I think forgiveness may be the most difficult and the most powerful act in our world.

Forgiveness allowed Ron and Nancy Anderson, a Christian couple who live in Huntington Beach, to survive one of the most difficult things a marriage can – an affair. I wrote about them and the book based on their story, “Avoiding the Greener Grass Syndrome.”

At times, I have looked at forgiveness in relation to certain social issues such as capital punishment.

On the first anniversary of Sept. 11, I saw forgiveness as a path to healing our nation’s heart and soul. Instead, after four years of war, its heart and soul now seem sorely wounded instead.

A couple years ago, I wrote about Robert Enright, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who in the early ‘90s sought research money to fund a program to teach prisoners how to forgive those who had wronged them, then to seek forgiveness from their victims. He was met with indifference by some, with disdain by others and warned by many that if he persisted he would ruin his career.

But persist he did. Now, 13 years after he founded the International Forgiveness Institute, the endeavor to promote forgiveness through research, books and films is flourishing like a wildfire in dry grass, adding to Enright’s work.

On Oct. 2, 2006, when Charles Carl Roberts IV killed five Amish schoolgirls and himself and gravely injured five others, the Amish community near Nickel Mines, Penn., astonished the nation by forgiving Roberts and his family without hesitation. It was like putting a bellows to the field of interest in forgiveness.

Many in this nation and elsewhere wondered aloud at how the parents and grandparents of these dead and wounded children could so readily forgive what seemed so unforgivable. Some imagined the ridiculous: that these Amish parents were feigning forgiveness to capture media attention.

Stories that tried to explain why Roberts would perpetrate such a horror and why this Amish community would so willingly extend their mercy seemed never-ending.

In the year since, three authors — Donald B. Kraybill, distinguished professor at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania; Steven M. Nolt, professor of history at Goshen College in Indiana; and David L. Weaver-Zercher, associate professor of religious history at Messiah College in Grantham, Penn., — have written a book on the events called “Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy.”

Kraybill spoke to us in San Antonio. He described the killings in painful detail, illuminating the immense mercy their forgiveness required.

He impressed upon us how the forgiveness was more than mere words. Of the 75 who attended Roberts’ funeral, half were Amish, some having buried their own dead only days before. They established a fund to aid the killer’s family.

Kraybill made it clear that souls ached and hearts were rent. The forgiveness was not without tears.

He spoke of how such forgiveness is in the Amish’s DNA: They are the descendants of Anabaptist martyrs who forgave their persecutors who burned them at the stake.

What lesson is in their story for us? On the back cover of the book Bill Moyers says our polarized country needs to hear it.

Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote “Dead Man Walking” says, “In a world where repaying evil with evil is almost second nature, the Amish remind us there’s a better way.”

Many are placing their hopes for the world in our ability to learn to forgive. Azim Khamisa, Stephen G. Post and Fred Luskin, spokespersons for the Campaign for Love & Forgiveness ( www.loveandforgive.org), are among them.

They, too, spoke to us in San Antonio. Post, who is president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love – Altruism, Compassion, Service, has written a book titled “Why Good Things Happen to Good People” and Luskin, a researcher and teacher of forgiveness has written “Forgive for Love.”

Khamisa, whose own son Tariq was murdered, has forgiven Tony Hicks who killed him. He has reached out and befriended Hicks’ grandfather, Ples Feliz.

He founded the Tariq Khamisa Foundation to sponsor school-based programs to teach nonviolence. He tells his story in his book called “Azim’s Bardo: A Father’s Journey from Murder to Forgiveness.”

They are spreading the message: Love. Forgive. Change everything.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].