Forgiveness by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

 

One of the great blessings of my life was working with a man named Eric Lomax. He’d been a prisoner of war on the Burma railway – ‘the death railway’.  Eric had – like thousands of others – been enlisted as slave labour, beaten and starved. But he’d also been tortured.  He struggled with the after-effects for years and in the end found peace by tracking down and confronting his torturer, a Kempei officer named Nagase.  Eric forgave Nagase and his story became the movie The Railway Man.  But the film didn’t tell the whole story … 

One of the oldest – the so-called core – stories in the Arabian Nights is The Trader and the Djinn:

A wealthy merchant is on a long journey. Weary, he plonks himself down in the shade and picks a few dates. Refreshed, he gets up, chucks the date stones over his shoulder and gets ready to travel on. He has only gone a few paces when he is confronted by a furious Djinn who accuses him of killing his son. One of the date stones has pierced the boy’s heart. (Djinn’s are made of fire so their skin is very easily penetrated.) The terrified merchant pleads with the Djinn, who gives him a year and a day to put his affairs in order and then return to him to be killed.

The merchant meant no harm. But a great harm was done. Any of us could be that merchant. And any of us could be the Djinn’s son. Just like any of us could be Peter. 

In an increasingly connected world, we hurt without meaning to and it’s easy to be hurt without knowing who to blame. In So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson tells story after story of how one ill-considered tweet – a fig stone thrown in a fit of pique or boredom – can be retweeted and retweeted to generate blame-storms that destroy lives. 

Hannah Arendt quotes a line from Karen Blixen in her essay on forgiveness: ‘All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.’ Eva Kor and Eric Lomax both came to a moment in their lives when they brought their hurt out of silence into the light of story. Their stories had political impact. Eva Kor was consciously engaging with holocaust deniers, concerned that the horrors that the Nazis perpetrated might be forgotten. She approached Nazi doctors partly because the guilty make better witnesses than the innocent. Eric – the first patient of the Institute for the Victims of Torture – spoke out against torture in general and waterboarding in particular at a time – during the Iraq war – when ‘civilised’ nations were trying to justify the use of torture in the fight against terror. This political dimension to their stories also helped restore in them a sense of their own worth and power. They had urgent and necessary truths to tell. 

But Eric didn’t tell his whole story. 

The Railway Man acknowledges the fact that when he came back from the war he was prone to bouts of depression, had a habit of secrecy, and did not take well to being asked questions, even by his bank manager. He was a difficult person to be around. He does not go into details about how difficult. He barely mentions his children. I got involved in making a film of Eric’s book because I thought his message of reconciliation was important and uplifting. I never questioned his story, partly because I realised – from conversations with Helen Bamber – that the telling and re-telling of his story was sometimes all that was holding Eric together. My wife Denise put it most beautifully, adapting a line of Yeats: ‘Tread softly,’ she said, ‘because you tread on his nightmares.’

Then one particularly glorious and glamorous day on the shoot we had two visitors – Eric’s daughter and her husband. I’d been working with Eric for years, but I’d never heard her name mentioned. It’s Charmaine. Charmaine has her own – remarkable – story to tell and it’s not for me to tell it here. Not least because Charmaine tells it herself beautifully. But – as an example – one of the things Eric spoke about was how when he came back from the war no one wanted to talk about what had happened to him. Charmaine told me that her mother had asked Eric about his wounds when he first returned and he’d told her in no uncertain terms never to ask him about that again. He was a man of intimidating natural authority. You didn’t cross him easily. So she never did ask him again. This is not to blame Eric, so much as to say that there were parts of his own story that even he hadn’t understood. By leaving his children out of his account, he may have thought he was protecting their privacy. He may have been unaware that this was hurtful. As a victim, overwhelmed by his own victimhood, he simply could not see that he might have victims of his own. By following Eric’s own account in making the film, I was compounding that error, taking it to another level. In the film Eric was played by an Oscar-winning actor. Charmaine was not mentioned at all. I had thrown the date stone over my shoulder with great force and pierced a heart that was already fragile. 

Inter-connected

Just before the coronavirus pandemic really took hold here in the UK, I started to read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s extraordinary novel The Corner That Held Them. It’s about the life of a convent during one of the outbreaks of plague in the Middle Ages.  The similarities with our own situation are very clear.  We don’t really know how COVID-19 works – how exactly it’s transmitted,  who is most vulnerable, how long the pandemic will go on.  In situations like this we look for stories that offer us some element of certainty.  Those stories often include finding someone to blame … for example, the President of the USA tries to blame the Chinese. In the UK people blame the government for not acting quickly enough, or for undermining the NHS.  Others still have come up with various conspiracy theories.  Out in the street, I now scowl at anyone who looks like they might be coming too near. 

We are all carrying a burden of responsibility on our backs – that we must do all we can to avoid unwittingly infecting others. But also a burden of fear that we might be infected by others.   One of things that I had to confront writing this book is that forgiveness is hard – it’s complicated,  it’s messy and in many ways it cuts against our most ingrained instincts.  But one starting point I found useful was to reflect on the way that we are all inter-connected in ways we don’t sometimes see.  That we are all implicated in the lives of others. That, when we are finding it hard to forgive someone, a good starting point might be to reflect on the harm that we have done unwittingly.  And in this week, to bring that knowledge to the foot of the Cross and to know that the great gift of Christ’s passion is forgiveness of sins. 

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Each day, we will post a short article by one of Darton, Longman and Todd’s amazing authors, offering a personal reflection on our current situation in life. Sometimes this will be written with reference to one of their books, and sometimes about how they are living in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus and our current world situation. We hope it will give you a taste of the depth and diversity of DLT’s list – books for heart, mind and soul that aim to meet the needs and interests of all.

Today’s post is by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, author of Forgiveness: How the Bible Can Help Us Understand. You can buy an eBook copy of the book here, or a physical copy here.