Last month, as another year came to a close, radio and television producers anxiously ran around getting their impressive year-end programmes ready. They were trying to focus on various important issues of 1998. So were companies and business houses engaged in taking stock of their performance. There were also individuals absorbed in introspection. Some of them were at, what is called in Christian terminology, a Retreat, a time for self-reflection and prayer.By some odd coincidence, the end of the year and Christmas fall approximately at the same time, a festival too complex even to try and describe. That Christmas itself came to be celebrated universally in such a manner is proof enough of the profound meaning and purpose of the Messiah's birth. Most people, however, now lament the commercialisation of Christmas, and rightly so. Somehow the spirit of Christmas and the lofty values taught by Jesus are hardly visible in the way the anniversary of Jesus coming into the world is celebrated.Once, Jesus wasapproached by Peter, who asked him: ``How many times must I forgive those who wrong me? Seven times?'' In his typical style, Jesus gave his considered reply: ``I tell you not seven but seventy times seven.'' And some of the unenlightened began actually to multiply seven into seventy, as if Jesus meant to put the reality of forgiveness in a mathematical formula.For Him forgiveness was stronger than even death and so as He was breathing his last on the Cross, He still prayed for his enemies, saying, ``Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing''. He might have sounded impractical when he said, ``if someone slaps you on the one cheek, turn to him the other as well.''Jesus tried to tell people that forgiveness was God's prescription for coming to terms with a world in which, despite their best intentions, people were unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply.The great Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, toward the end of her epochal study on the human condition, shared herdiscovery of the only power that can stop the inexorable stream of painful memories and she called it ``the faculty of forgiveness''. The examples of forgiving the enemy set by Gandhiji, Nelson Mandela, Aquino and many other great souls just goes to prove that forgiving others, though difficult, is not a divine act, and certainly not impossible.Forgiving may seem unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. We even assign this responsibility to God and sometimes ourselves act as God, judging people. That is why Jesus said, ``Judge not and you shall not be judged.''Lewis Smedes in his book Forgive and Forget suggests, ``Wh-en you forgive the person who hurt you deeply and unfairly, you perform a miracle that has no equal. Nothing else is the same. Forgiving has its own feel, colour and climax, different from any other creative act in the repertoire of human relationships.''As we indulge in stocktaking of the year gone by, particularly at the personal level, theteachings of Lord Jesus on forgiveness or indeed of the Holy Quran stand in good stead. ``If the person forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from Allah'' (Quran 42: 40). During the course of the year, we may have encountered several instances of hurt, anger, violence, aggression, etc. Even if we don't take recourse to the teachings of Jesus or of the Quran, we may still want to answer the question, ``What good is it for me to keep the wounds of hurt festering?'' The miracle of forgiveness can heal the hurts, enhance personal growth and cement one's relationship with God.
