News of a ceasefire breakthrough in Gaza was greeted with celebrations in the streets this week, yet tempered by awareness that lasting peace between Israel and Palestine was still far off.
Also this week, the incoming administration in Washington had to admit that boasts of ending Russian aggression in Ukraine on the new president’s first day in the White House were campaign bluster, and that it would take months or even longer to resolve.
In both conflicts, stopping the fighting will not mean that peace has been won. Real peace requires forgiveness and reconciliation. Which, in both situations, is a looong way off.
Few remember how distrusting, fearful and uncertain the post-war years of the late 1940s were, with lives, bodies, families, cities and nations having been broken, disrupted and destroyed. How do you rebuild out of such brokenness? This is the question again being asked by responsible leaders in Gaza, Israel and Ukraine.
While everyone knows who won WW2, few remember who won the peace. That is a story of radical spirituality, forgiveness rooted in the ‘unpractical’, ‘superspiritual’, ‘otherworldly’, ’naïve’ exhortation of Jesus to ‘love your enemy’. We tend to take for granted the past 80 years of peace in Europe as normal – because it is all we have known. Yet it was the literal obedience to this command of Jesus by a handful of believers that made it possible for the swamp of bitterness and revenge to be drained in western Europe. Sadly, the communist-dominated parts of Europe never experienced this cathartic process, as evidenced in current Kremlin rhetoric about ‘exterminating nazis’ from Ukraine.
Smuggled notes
I have often recounted the story told me once in Brussels by a French journalist, Paul Collowald, who had worked with Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister who initiated the European integration process. Schuman was the first French member of parliament to have been arrested by the Gestapo after the German occupation of Paris. Collowald recalled the notes he had seen that Schuman had smuggled out to the French underground from his solitary confinement. They read: “We French will have to learn to love and forgive the Germans to rebuild Europe after the war.”
How radical is that??!! Call it ‘unpractical’, ‘superspiritual’, ‘otherworldly’, ’naïve’, yet Schuman, a devout Catholic, wrote in direct obedience to Jesus’ command, ‘Love your enemies’.
The process of European integration would probably have never been catalysed without the profound and heartfelt interaction of forgiveness and reconciliation among key French and German representatives, starting with Schuman and his German colleague and fellow believer, Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of Western Germany. After the war, a movement called Moral ReArmament (MRA), led by Lutheran evangelist Frank Buchman, converted a hotel in the Swiss mountains at Caux, above Montreux, into a Centre for the Reconciliation of the Nations. Thousands of civil servants, politicians, trade unionists, clergymen, academics, educationalists, theologians, journalists and civil leaders from Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Britain, Scandanavia, Japan and other former enemies met there regularly learning to forgive and become ‘part of the healing instead of the illness’. Adenauer and his family regularly attended (see photo above), and Buchman was instrumental in bringing him together with Schuman.
Off the map
French underground socialist atheist, Mme Irene Laure, so hated the Germans she wished the nation to be wiped off the map. Her deeply-moving story is told in the video, For the love of tomorrow. Transformed from deep hatred to compassionate forgiveness, Mme Laure became an ambassador of reconciliation to the Germans from whom she asked forgiveness for her hatred.
The long-term moral, mental and spiritual health of the Ukrainian people, all of whom have been personally affected through loss of family members, friends, limbs and even life, will eventually require the release of bitterness and anger, and facilitate the re-humanization of the ‘other.’ However to suggest forgiveness when a people are still fighting for survival against a ruthless enemy who has not yet been defeated may be insensitive and counter-productive. ‘Reconciliation’, I’m told, is a word many Ukrainians don’t even want to think about yet – at least not until appropriate repentance, acknowledgement of guilt and reparation has been made.
That probably would take military defeat, regime change and total heart change as happened to Germany. Yet the radical nature of the love of Christ was to pray in the midst of his suffering, ‘Father, forgive them for they know what what they do.’ While the invader may very well know what he is doing, leaders of faith communities will have to take a lead in encouraging fellow Ukrainians to guard their hearts against attitudes that would erode the transformation and reconstruction process.
While reconciliation is a two-way street, requiring both sides to reach out to each other (obviously presently impossible), forgiveness is unilateral and remains the choice of each individual.
May God raise up peacemakers like Mme Laure, ‘apostles of reconciliation’ as Schuman worded it, among the Ukrainians and Russians. And like Lisa Loden among the Israelis and Palestinians – see my interview with her here: November Schuman Talk.
Till next week,
