Is sorry really the hardest word?

16/11/09 | Posted by Poppy

The prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd has apologised to the hundreds of thousands of people, some British migrants, who were abused or neglected in state care as children and said that he hoped that this statement would lead to a 'turning point' in Australian history. Should an apology come before forgiveness? Is an apology ever enough?

 The long road to forgiveness

The full story can be found on the BBC news website

Some of the stories are harrowing. Families were split up. Children and parents were lied to. In some cases there was abuse, both physical and sexual.

From the news clip I saw on the morning news it appears that the apology is not enough for some of the child migrants. Some of them are demanding that the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown should apologise as well. This may happen but how do we deal with forgiveness when a great wrong has happened? Do we have to wait for an apology before we can move on and forgive or can and should forgiveness come first?

It is a tricky one. My life experience is nothing like that of those youngsters who were sent thousands of miles away from their hometowns and links, however fragile, with their families but I’ve had to learn some very hard lessons in forgiveness. Parts of my family are masters at grudge bearing and will refuse to speak to other members of the family for much more trivial events then the sending of a child overseas and not telling them where they are going. I seem to remember that ‘she shouldn’t have got into the chief mourner’s car at Granddad’s funeral was a source of one part of the family not communicating with the other for years and years. The bitching and backstabbing and badmouthing had to be lived through to be believed. It seems silly when you look back on events but it was very real at the time. Of course there are the attempts to heal the breach and then one of the chief complaints is ‘she should have known’ and ‘she should apologise.’

Maybe your family is more sensible than mine. For some of my nearest and dearest, waiting for someone to apologise first for a past hurt is, quite honestly, like waiting for hell to freeze over. It isn’t going to happen.

So if I wait for someone to apologise before I forgive them, that forgiveness can’t happen and maybe I get angry and hurt and more damage is done.

Now I can blame all this hurt and anger on someone else, they should apologise as it is all their fault, or I can break the cycle of blame and counter blame. I can be brave and forgive first.

It isn’t easy. When there were a series of events that left me badly hurt a few years ago and I felt that I had been betrayed by people I had thought were my friends, I found it really hard to let go of the anger. I knew that as a Christian there would need to be forgiveness at some stage and the example of my family fueds and grudges showed me how toxic it can be to wait for an apology from those people that had hurt me.

My example of forgiveness came from the story of the Prodigal Son that Jesus told and which can be found in the gospel of Luke 15 11-32. In this story an young man squanders his inheritence on wine, women and song and then comes back home expecting to stay poor and miserable, but at least he will be poor and miserable in a familar place on his family land. To his complete amazement he is completely forgiven by his father who sees the son coming down the road and runs to meet him and then throws a huge party to welcome him home.

Now I’m not superhuman and find it hard to forgive and in my experience it took years and a lot of false starts. I thought I had found it in my heart to forgive these people and then something would happen and I would find myself angry and resentful all over again but those two things - my families example and that story that Jesus told kept me on track.

I leant not to wait for an apology and that forgiveness is the way to live.

So what happens in those situations when someone is so injured that they really can’t forgive and I can fully undersatnd that some of the child migrants whose lives really were changed beyond all reckoning will find it really hard to forgive those who sent them away from their families, with or without and apology from the UK government. When I’ve found it hard to forgive I’ve prayed that one day I might be able to. It is a small first step but it is a step down that road to forgiveness.

So maybe if you are reading this and it strikes a chord then the post a prayer section on this website could be somewhere to start. Maybe a prayer for some hurt or some situation where there aren’t going to be apologies and where you have to take the first step. Or a prayer for someone who is stuggling with anger over past wrongs. Or a prayer to give thanks that there has been healing in a situation that looked very bleak.

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