In November of 2004, I knew something was terribly wrong. I knew that I called
myself a peace activist and a man of peace but that I spoke with hatred in my
heart. Richard Bach in his book Illusions said, "If you really need
something and you open this book you are reading at random, it will open to the
page you most need."
And so one day the course catalogue for nearby Immaculata University came. I
thought I needed another drawing course, but when I opened the booklet my eyes
fell immediately upon a course in the theology section. The course was called:
Forgiveness, The way to Love in a Wounded World.
I have to tell you that Iâm not Catholic. And Iâm not Christian; I was raised
Jewish, but I did not practice Judaism, and I really didnât believe in much of
anything. Yet still I thought: This is what I need. I have to go, and I have to
take this course. And, to me, it was like standing at the top of a cliff, and
diving in, hoping that the reflection I saw at the bottom was a deep pool of
water and not the shiny surface of a rock. Fortunately it was Sister Sheila
Galligan, and she taught me that forgiveness was a process that I had to work
on.
So I started to work on forgiveness. Two things, well, two events helped me
very much. Sister Sheila said, ãIf you canât be with the person you are trying
to forgive, you can have a conversation with them anyhow. You can write a
letter to them. You can sit next to an empty chair and talk both sides of the
conversation. I did write a letter. I wrote a letter to my son Nick. And a few
days later, I retrieved it from the drawer I mailed it in, and I wrote the
response that Iâd want to hear.
That kind of set me up well for sitting down with George Bush in an empty chair
next to me. And we talked. We talked about the things that wound people. I knew
he was wounded. I could see his wound. And I asked him about that. And he said,
ãWell you know, poverty wounds people, but so sometimes does affluence. And
children who grow up in a single-parent family, in a broken family, may be
wounded too, but so can people growing up in families that are together where
there is no love. And we went on, and there were a lot of reasons that I
thought of, things that might have wounded George Bush. And in the end I got
up, and I said, ãYeah, you know, I didnât like your father much either.ä
The conversation I had with Zarqawi , who is the person who supposedly actually
wielded the knife, was much more serious. I said to him, ãWhy do you do those
things?ä And he said, ãWell look what your government has done to us.ä And I
said, ãWell, look what youâve done to my son, and Iâm still as peaceful as I
can be. I certainly havenât hurt anybody.ä And he said, ãWell, you know,
when your son Nick died, you were fifty-nine years old. You had a certain
amount of emotional maturity. (Although some people might disagree.) You had a
support group around you. You had dealt with grief before in your life. And you
grew up in a land of peace. You grew up in a community of peace. You grew up
with peace all around you never touched by war. ã
ãWhat if, instead of being fifty-nine years old, you had been five years old in
nineteen ninety one with green bombs flashing around you? What if the next
thing you knew you woke up several days later in a hospital without any of your
loved ones around you because they had all perished in that green flash. You
had no emotional maturity. You had no experience with grief. And you certainly
didnât live in a land of peace. Might you then not have strapped a bag of bombs
to your back or flown an airplane into a building?ä
And I hope I wouldnât. I hope I wouldnât. But it really made me stop and think.
And I think that these two activities helped me the most to come to terms
with George Bush and Zarqawi and others. I had lots and lots of conversations,
and I still have them. Sister Sheila said that forgiveness is a process. Itâs a
journey. And itâs something like quitting smoking cigarettes. Sometimes you
have to start over again. Sometimes you have to start over and over again
everyday for a while.