On the 29th March, Buddhist Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, will arrive in London for the start of his short UK tour guiding followers in spiritual reflection and peaceful protest. I’ve been interested in Thich Nhat Hanh for a number of years, not just for his peace activism but also because his poem Call Me By My True Names seems to really encapsulate the ethos at the heart of The Forgiveness Project – namely that good and evil exist in us all.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s life of reflection has led him to believe that forgiveness is the key to creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world, and that “only when compassion is born in your heart, is it possible to forgive.”

The aspect of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings that has always interested me most is the way in which he reaches out to those who feel wounded by their parents. I don’t count myself as one of the wounded but it has always struck me that his approach to this aspect of our past is a lot more tender than some other voices out there in the field of human consciousness and spirituality. Caroline Myss, for example, describes revisiting childhood hurts and trauma as “woundology” informing her audiences that “trying to work out who hurt you as a child is not a spiritual path but a who-dun-it’.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s method – though more gentle – is just as direct. In the film The Power of Forgiveness, he is seen reciting his mediation for the “many angry sons and daughters”. In a soft, measured voice he instructs, in meditative breathing, a room full of people who want to move on: “breathing in I see myself as a 5-year-old child; breathing out I hold that 5-year-old child with tenderness. Breathing in I see my father as a 5-year-old boy; breathing out I smile to my father as a 5-year-old boy”. The point is that only when you are able to visualize your father as a fragile and vulnerable 5-year-old, can you begin to understand and feel compassion for the person he has become.

Thich Nhat Hanh explains that you must move from this place of animosity because if you are full of anger you only cause more suffering to yourself as well as to the person you’re angry at –“that is why,” he concludes, “those who are wise do not want to do anything when in a place of anger. When you are calm and lucid, you see that the other person is a victim of confusion, of hate and of violence transmitted by society, by parents, by friends, by environment. And when you are able to do that you’re anger is no longer there.”

Thich Nhat Hanh is in the UK 29 March-10 April 2012, accompanied by monks and nuns from Plum Village. Organised by The Community of Interbeing UK, he will be in London to give a public talk at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, lead Sit in Peace in Trafalgar Square and a conference-retreat for educators. There will be 5-day retreat for the public from 5-10 April at Nottingham University.

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Last week I had the privilege to hear an exceptionally powerful talk by Azim Khamisa — a father who lost his only son to gang violence 17 years ago and who I first met in America seven years ago. It is a terrible irony that Azim left Kenya trying to escape the violence of Idi Amin only to have his son die on the streets of an American city that he had picked for him. Azim begins his story at the moment of hearing news of his son’s murder at the hands of 14-year-old Tony Hicks, describing how “as a nuclear bomb went off in my heart, I realized that if I did not forgive I would remain a victim all my life.” Even in those early hours he knew that revenge was a precursor of every new act of violence.

Azim was in London to share his story with the Youth Justice Board. In the years since his son’s death he has spoken in front of a million young people, hoping to put a face on violence and demonstrate how the trauma of loss can — when transformed by forgiveness — become a movement for change. Azim has been awarded over 60 peace prizes and soon after his son’s murder founded the Tariq Khamisa Foundation (TFK) — an organization committed to stopping children from killing children.

Had we been in America, Azim would most likely have been standing next to Ples Felix, the grandfather and legal guardian of his son’s killer. The two men’s paths collided in 1995 when Tony — initiated into gang culture from the age of eleven — shot dead Tariq, who had been lured to a bogus address while delivering pizzas. Over the years Azim and Ples have become close friends, bound together by shared heartbreak, as well as a common commitment to the principles of non violence, empathy and forgiveness. “Who is the enemy?” asks Azim, “the 14-year-old who killed my son or societal forces that forced Tony to join a gang? There were victims at both ends of the gun.”

He first met his son’s killer when Tony was 19. Tony is now 31, having been the first 14-year-old to stand trial as an adult in the state of California. He still has another 15 years to serve but Azim sees no point in him languishing in jail and is determined to get him out as soon as he can. His plan is to have Tony work for him. “I could take the position that Tony should hang from the highest pole and die,” he continues, “but how would that help anyone? On the other hand, if we save him, and get him out there saving others, then he becomes our most powerful weapon against youth violence because he’s been there and done it.” Redemption is a big part of the TKF ethos. Many of the young gang members they work with must volunteer in the community as a way of repairing the damage and helping prevent others from committing similar offences.

The work Azim does to ‘save’ violent young people is all about transformation or what he calls change at a soulular level — a term he coined to express deep, sustainable inner change. As a Sufi Muslim he realized his math and finance degrees were useless when his son died and that it was his spiritual life which saved him. Wary of the politics and dogma of organized religion, he prefers to talk about spirituality and is convinced that encouraging young people to respect and embrace different wisdom traditions can give them an inner resource that will sustain them through hard times. It’s what he calls our ‘internal navigation system’ — a spiritual life that once tapped into can allow for real shifts to take place.

As founder of The Forgiveness Project, I have spoken with dozens of people who have suffered unspeakable horror like Azim and heard many of them describe how it was forgiveness that was able to open a path to the future and forge a way through. Some have described this ‘way through’ in terms of life No.1 (up until the tragedy), and life No.2 (after the tragedy). Forgiveness seems to be a way of rediscovering meaning in life and embracing the narrative of hope as opposed to becoming stuck in the story of trauma. Aqueela Sherrils, a former LA gang member and now an advocate for non-violence who also lost his son to murder, talks about “finding the gift in the wound”; Katy Hutchison promised her four-year-old twins on the day her husband was murdered that “underneath the horror of what had just happened we would find a gift.” Azim, like them, is convinced: “In every conflict there is an opportunity to create love and unity. If you stay in resentment who are you hurting?”

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There is something mysterious and deeply rewarding about reading a book which perfectly and beautifully sums up an internal dialogue that you’ve been having with yourself for years. As founder and director of The Forgiveness Project, I’ve been exposed to many theories and analyses on the meaning of forgiveness, but nothing has been presented to me with such clarity and eloquence as Healing Agony: Re-Imagining Forgiveness – a refreshing and thorough interpretation of this complex and often most excruciating of subjects by Stephen Cherry..

What I love about this book is that Cherry refuses to box forgiveness. While exploring the various debates around the limits of forgiveness, he won’t be drawn into defining a word that is in danger of becoming cheapened by simple explanations. His book is a welcome antidote to a growing movement which perpetuates what Cherry describes as the “idealized myth of forgiveness” – a movement which promotes forgiveness as a panacea for all ills and thus creates a social and moral imperative around something that is deeply personal, always different, and should be free of obligation and guilt.

There are no simple answers in this book and the more you delve into what forgiveness is and what it isn’t, the less you find yourself able to pin it down. As Cherry states, forgiveness has become “the most impossible but the most important” word in our vocabulary. After reading this book, you won’t come away with a single, simplified idea of what forgiveness is, but you will have gained real insight into why people choose to forgive and the progression of what Cherry calls the “forgiving heart”. You will also most certainly come away with a deeper appreciation of why forgiveness is difficult, painful and risky, but also why – in its ability to heal – it is potentially transformative.

While Healing Agony is aimed at Christians searching for a deeper understanding of the true nature of forgiveness, it is nonetheless relevant to everyone, and, as a non-Christian myself, Healing Agony is about the best book to date I’ve read on the subject. Indeed, it’s very rare for me to reach the end of a book and want to start all over again but with Healing Agony I did just that – knowing that on the second reading I would discover even more layers in this subtle, nuanced and most surprising of topics.

to read the first two chapters of Healing Agony click here

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