Title: Forgiveness: The gift that brings you back to life.
Portia's speech in Shakespeare's
"The Merchant of Venice"
(Act IV, Scene 1)
Portia may be right when she says that the quality of mercy is not
strained, that it falls like a gentle, Godly rain upon our hearts.
Still, contemporary popular culture doesn't usually flood us with
intelligent and impassioned treatments of our need for forgiveness.
Instead, the weekly fare at the octiplex, cable's movie-of-the-week,
and the blockbuster thrillers on the best-seller list normally provide
us with a steady downpour of righteous enemy bashing. In films,
fiction, and political ads we are regularly showered with an
escalating torrent of avenging angels, wronged (and often nasty)
innocents venting their--and supposedly our--indignation and firepower
on all the usual suspects. And even when forgiveness does make an
occasional appearance in a film or novel, it's so often portrayed as a
piece of sentimental piety that we end up dismissing it as an utterly
romantic notion, unfit for the real world.
Hard look at what may well be the most radical demand of the gospel--Christ's call to love our enemy. In Christ's eyes, "every person is worth
more than his worst act."
Meanwhile, Tim Robbins' directorial effort, "Dead Man Walking,"
casts Susan Sarandon as a New Orleans nun trying to help a convicted
killer and his victims' parents come to grips with a heinous crime.
The film is based on the book with the same title (Random House, 1993)
by Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., who worked with death-row inmates and
their victims' families. Robbins' film argues that for both the killer
and the victims, forgiveness may be the only way to recover a
fractured humanity.
So forgive and forget and live happily
Jhanak
Udne Ki Aasha
