Forgiveness and Forgetting by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Frank Cottrell-Boyce ponders the theme of forgiveness in his new book for DLT …

There’s a terrific short story by Ernest Hemingway called The Capital of the World in which a young man – Paco – runs off to Madrid to become a bullfighter. He ends up as a waiter in a café. One day, he spots this advert in El Libro: ‘Paco, meet me at Hotel Montana, Noon, Tuesday. All is forgiven…’ When Paco gets to the rendezvous, he finds the hotel jammed with eight hundred other young men – all called Paco – all waiting to be reunited with their fathers.

Most of us feel that at some point in our lives someone – a parent, a teacher, a spouse, a stranger, a government, God – has wronged us. And we wish that person would come and beg us for forgiveness.

When we stop and consider, most of us would admit that at some point in our lives we have hurt someone else and wish they would forgive us.

We have all heard of spectacular acts of forgiveness. Think of Nelson Mandela leaving prison after decades of imprisonment with a heart full of hope and no apparent wish for redress. Or Eva Kor who – along with her twin sister – was the victim of Mengele’s twisted human experiments in Auschwitz, but who in 2015, as a witness at the trial of SS Officer Oskar Gröning, walked across the court and embraced him.

We find acts of forgiveness like this awe-inspiring partly because they are awe-inspiring but also because we know from experience that forgiveness is really hard. I thought one of my science teachers at school was picking on me. So I didn’t do science A levels. Ever since I’ve blamed him for blowing my life off course. Even though I’m having an amazingly happy life, I’m still angry with him. Even though I can see now that he probably wasn’t picking on me at all. He just was a bit clumsy in the jokes department. I invited an old friend to a surprise party. He didn’t turn up. So he’s not my friend any more. I have a couple of grudges that I nurse as carefully as if they were new-born babies.

In our own time there are new obstacles on the road to forgiveness. Forgiveness involves moving on, leaving things behind. But how can anyone ‘forgive and forget’ in the digital age? Forgiveness has always been best friends with Forgetting, but it’s much more difficult to forget and move on now that we’ve all become each other’s recording angels. There is always someone there to remind you.

A Personal Side-Note

As I was nearing completion of the first draft of my new book, a news story broke that made me engage with the subject of forgiveness in a different way. In the UK, a nineteen-year-old boy named Harry Dunn died after his motorbike was in collision with a car owned by the wife of an American diplomat. The car’s owner took the first plane home to the US and claimed diplomatic immunity. Everyone in the nation was appalled by the way the law was used to frustrate the course of justice. As the days went on, I found that the story would not let me go. It so happens that the child of one of our neighbours – a close friend of our son – was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Over the years we’ve seen the way the almost unbearable pain caused by the loss of a child, has been intensified and multiplied by the sense of unfinished business, the lack of justice, the lack of information. So, I’ve come to see this as a kind of test case. In the back of my mind I’ve been asking myself the question: Could the Bible help that family find forgiveness?

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This is an edited extract from the introduction of Forgiveness: How The Bible Can Help Us Understand by Frank Cottrell-Boyce. It is available now in paperback and as an eBook.