Lockerbie and Forgiveness
Posted by Colin Tipping on August 31, 2009
Most people are of the mind that forgiveness is difficult. I don’t agree. The hard part is making the decision to do it. Once you make the decision, the rest can be easy, especially if you use the tools of Radical Forgiveness with which to do it.
Time helps. In the early days, when we are still raw from the pain and suffering, we are likely to decide in that moment never to forgive. But as the years go by and the rope burn of the grief has subsided and the wound has at least stopped bleeding, we are sometimes given an opportunity to bring some higher reasoning to that decision.
The families of the 270 passengers on Pan Am Flight 103, blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, by Libyan terrorists, were recently given such an opportunity. It occurred when the only man ever convicted of that heinous crime was released from prison and allowed to return home to Libya on compassionate grounds after serving only eight years of his life sentence. The dispensation was made in the light of his having terminal prostate cancer and the likelihood of his dying within three months.
Twenty years or so have passed since the tragedy and eight years since the conviction of el Megrahi, so we might imagine that a few people who lost friends and family members that day took the opportunity on this occasion to reflect on their own feelings and may even have perhaps moved into to a place of forgiveness. The media, of course, focused on and supported those who, quite understandably, did not. They were outraged by the decision to let the man go even if he was dying.
Who is to say they should forgive el Megrahi? Not I. I see no moral imperative here. Forgiveness is a spiritual choice, not a moral one. The families are perfectly entitled to hold on to their hate and need for revenge if they want to. Their loss was great and their lives changed forever by the actions of this man. They are unlikely to be swayed by the fact that whether he rots in jail and dies in jail, or goes home to die, changes nothing and insofar as it has any bearing on their own future is quite inconsequential. To them, it has great symbolic meaning and it increases their suffering. That’s the choice they make.
There is a chance however that some of them might have come to see the extreme irony in the fact that while the object of their hatred goes free, they are the ones who remain in a prison of their own making. And maybe in seeing the irony so graphically presented on television, it may shock them into seeing that the key to their own freedom is their forgiveness of el Megrahi and all the others involved in the bombing of Pan Am 103.
Forgiveness is a choice we make, not for any moral reason, but for our own spiritual health and wellbeing. To forgive is to become free from anger and resentment and to connect with the source of our own being which is love. To forgive is to open our minds, in all humility, to the possibility that there might be a higher purpose in what happens to us in life and that the hand of God is in there somewhere. To the extent that we won’t allow that possibility, we deny God and separate ourselves from our own source. That is the prison we make for ourselves. And it’s our choice to make.
