Apology, Forgiveness, and Mercy

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

John Paul Lederach, in his formulation of "reconciliation," said it was made up of four separate elements, all balanced and working together: peace, justice, truth, and mercy. He described mercy as

compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, and a new start. This is he idea of grace. Without ... mercy, healthy relationships would not be possible. Without compassion and forgiveness, healing and restoration would be out of the question.

Lederach doesn't mention "apology," and, in a sense, it doesn't go in the same category as forgiveness or mercy, because that is something that the victim offers the perpetrator, while apology is something that the perpetrator offers the victim(s). But apology and forgiveness are often linked. Forgiveness is seldom offered unless the perpetrator gives a heart-felt and genuine apology, showing sincere regret for their actions, and most importantly, perhaps, assuring that the wrong will not happen again. That makes it much easier for the victim to let go, to forgive and move forward. Without such, fearing the perpetrator might harm again, forgiveness is much more difficult.

It is important to note, however, as does Chip Hauss in his BI essay on Apology and Forgiveness, that apology does not mean one forgets about what happened. Hauss, a Jew, reflects on the Holocaust in his 2003 essay:

There is an important but very common misperception about apology and forgiveness. When I talk to many of my fellow Jews about the need to forgive Germans so that we can "get beyond" the victim mentality so many of us still have following the Holocaust and the other trials we have suffered over the centuries, I'm frequently accused of saying I want them to forget those horrid events ever happened.

Absolutely not. We do have to remember the past as we consider ways of making certain holocausts never happen again. I live with the constant pain that much of my family was wiped out. We have pictures of relatives who were born at about the same time my mother was, in the early 1920s. She never met them because international travel was rare in the 1930s. She never will meet them because they are all dead. And I will never meet their children because they were never born. ...

In other words, I can forgive because I can remember. And because I can forgive, I can work with ease with my German contemporaries, whose fathers may well have killed my cousins. And because so many Germans have apologized for what happened under the Nazis, they can work with people like me without feeling guilty for what their parents' generation did.

So while apology was not part of Lederach's reconciliation formula, it is closely linked to mercy and forgiveness, which are.