Unforgivable Acts

You may recall our friend GQ, the Great Questioner. She asks, "What are unforgivable acts?' Whole theologies and lifetimes have been devoted to this question. I want to touch on one or two aspects of it that have concerned me for a long time.

Todays Photos By Jan

Most computers come with screen savers. Using modern machinery, these moving pictures aren't usually necessary, but in the misty dawn of computing - 20 years ago - screen savers secured screens from "burn in." Burn-in is the creation of a permanent image on the screen when a picture becomes part of the screen itself. The image never goes away.

My first experience of burn-in occurred 13 years after the end of World War II, when I was given three concentration camp picture books for my 13th birthday. Those images, which I studied individually, carefully, are still present in my mind, burned in for life I think. If it amuses you, you can attribute many aspects of my behavior during the rest of my life - from impatience to years of human rights work - to the presence of those persistent pictures in my brain.

I've never put energy into banishing those sickening images of stick-figure men and heaps of corpses. To do so would be to shut out the people who suffered and died, and their memory.

Over the years I've met many people who held firmly to their own depictions of terrible suffering and death. I sat under a tree with three nuns in the Philippines who went through album after album - like newlyweds showing off their photo extravaganza - of pictures as terrible as my own burned-in screen, maybe more so, since color photography had been invented since I was 13. They turned the pages slowly and lovingly and exclaimed over the bodies and bruises and blood quietly, one by one. I sat similarly with mothers and wives from Chile to Viet Nam as they brought their lost loved ones into my life.

The sharpest recollection has no photo album. I was in a cold hall in Santiago, Chile, while dictator Pinochet was still holding on to power. After dinner the "wives of the disappeared" came to the front, someone put on music, and they danced the national dance of Chile, the cueca, a slow circling of couples that is the most dignified testimony to regard and love I've ever seen. These women danced alone. In the still hall, they circled invisible lovers, their hands holding aloft the traditional white handkerchief, staring at their lost lamented men with longing and tears.

I used to think that humanity had reached the peak of unforgivable acts in the 20th Century, with its decade by decade inventory of genocides and slaughters. But surely this impression arises from picture books and history class and the media's disinclination to report beyond yesterday, today and tomorrow. I've been reading Montefiore's extraordinary book, Jerusalem: The Biography. Learning the eye-witness details of the gruesome slaughter of an entire city's population in 70 AD, I was taught that no, by no means have I seen it all.

All of this musing about the past is meant to provide you with an orientation to the platform I stand on in considering GQ's question. It's to confess that I don't have a fully-developed interest in forgiveness. I've always felt kind of bad about this lack. And I avoid the well-developed theology of forgiveness; I'm not that interested in Alexander Pope's cop-out: "to err is human, to forgive, divine." And I don't spend much time in the long tradition of promoting forgiveness as a method of personal improvement - removal of the (presumed) corrupting shard of anger from one's heart.

To me, the most important connection to unforgivable acts arises not from forgiveness, but from remembering. The images from Treblinka and Santiago and Quang Tri and Cagoyan de Oro and so many other places are what keeps all of those people from extinction and their suffering from meaninglessness. It keeps us - them and me - in a relationship. This connection is part of what defines and possibly even creates my own humanity.

And so many of us try to bear witness. The human rights activists who documented each one of the thousands of tortured and missing people in Brazil and Argentina (producing a movement called Nunca Mas/Mais - Never Again), probably took their risks for the sake of remembering and bearing witness as ends in themselves. Many who document unforgivable acts learn that their efforts may never bring perpetrators to the courtroom, but they always produce remembrance and connection.

The deep attraction of this approach, putting witness ahead of forgiveness - is that it directs my life's attention towards those who suffered and died, rather than the twisted creatures who are the authors of those horrors. I hold the deepest respect for those who track and bring to justice evil men who did the dirty work of Hitler and Pol Pot and so many others. Those of us intent on bearing witness may be more inclined to turn away from examination of our relationship with evil doers, instead holding in our hearts the lives of women and children and men whose suffering is burned into our brains and maybe into our souls.

So dear GQ, I do suspect that some acts are unforgivable, at least by me. I'm OK with that. I'm more confident that some acts are unforgettable, and it is in remembering that I choose to dwell.