Dig two graves

- When setting out on a journey of revenge, dig two graves - Confucius

I saw that the latest question asked at On Faith was about forgiveness ... How can we forgive our enemies? Should we, even if they have committed atrocities? ..... and I was intrigued because last night I finally got to watch the Spiderman 3 movie, and it had a theme of forgiveness vs revenge. At On Faith, I read the answer given by Tom Reese SJ, which was interesting, and I saw at the bottom of the page a link to the Forgiveness Project at the Woodstock Theological Center where he works. From there I went to one of the talks given by William Bole - The Politics of Forgiveness, and the Culture of Revenge. It was also interesting so I thought I'd post just the beginning of the talk here below.

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[...] This question of forgiveness and revenge is very much with us today and it’s resonating in our culture – including our popular culture. One night this past September, I clicked on the television to watch the 10:00 news and caught the tail end of an episode of “Criminal Minds,” a series about FBI profilers. The episode was apparently about someone who went postal, murdering a few of his co-workers, and I gather that he perished in the end. As the show closed, with images of lives lost and rescued, a voiceover intoned, “Confucius said, ‘When setting out on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’ ”

I thought: now this is wisdom that I’d welcome from a prime-time television drama. And, curious about the prevalence of such wisdom, I searched for discussions of revenge on the Internet. I was sobered to find some other messages, different messages, including Web sites with names like “Revenge Unlimited” and “ThePayback.Com,” which give tips on how to settle scores with friends, lovers, co-workers, and any others who have given you offense. And this being America, some of these sites also peddle revenge products, like dead-fish packages (which, for those interested, go for $19.99, shipping included). Payback.Com says, “There's nothing that gets your message across better than a smelly, nasty dead fish!” No doubt, if your message carries as odorously.

Anyhow, hearing the words of Confucius that night on television was something of a coincidence, because I had been out at Boston College, at a forum on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Lutheran theologian who was born a hundred years ago and died a martyr against Nazism. Bonhoeffer was a pacifist who never renounced his belief that all violence is antithetical to Christian faith, as revealed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. He once wrote that no deed on earth could justify an act of revenge or any manner of retribution, including “retributive justice.” And yet, he chose to take part in a conspiracy to assassinate Adolph Hitler, a choice that sealed his martyrdom when he was just 39 years old.

That same week, I was reading a piece in The New Yorker by Lawrence Wright, about the future of Islamic jihad (in the edition dated September 11, 2006). In that piece, he talked about a Palestinian sheikh named Abu-Muhammad al-Maqdisi, described by Wright as “one of the most renowned ideologues of the radical Islamist movement.” What caught my interest, especially in light of our topic tonight, was Maqdisi’s apparent belief that he is not in the business of revenge. Sure, he spends his days whipping up holy war on the West, but he draws the line at suicide bombings, and he had this to say in July 2004, after a string of suicide attacks by Al-Qaeda in Iraq: “There is no point in vengeful acts that terrify people, provoke the entire world against mujahideen, and prompt the world to fight them [meaning the jihadists].”

So, during a week or two in September, I heard a TV drama convey traditional wisdom about the futility of revenge, I checked in on Web sites that not only recommend revenge but facilitate the dirty deed, I heard talks about a Christian peacemaker who, some say, resorted to retribution, and I read a piece that talked about an Islamic warrior who disavows vengeance. Forgive me if I don’t give a straight answer to the question of how people are working through these concepts of forgiveness and revenge.

What I will give, in these brief remarks, is an illustration of revenge and retribution in politics, particularly in the politics of extremely fractious societies. Then I’ll illustrate an alternative road, what we, at Woodstock, see as a fledging, international politics of forgiveness, a turn toward reconciliation in the midst of social fractiousness. And I’ll part with a few remarks about the space between forgiveness and revenge, with a bow in the direction of our friend and colleague Bob Bies, and in doing so I’ll prowl around this question of whether revenge can ever be right .......

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Fr. Reese ends his answer at On Faith with these words ... Forgiveness and reconciliation is not easy, it takes strength. It takes maturity and patience. It takes political courage. And it takes a lot of faith. I'm happy to say that by the end of the movie, Peter/Spiderman had arrived at the same conclusion.