CHRISTIAN faith demands of us to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. Many of us, whether Christians or not, know that we should forgive. But we rebel against the demand to forgive hurled at the victim. Abuse can traumatise a self so terribly that it finds the very thought of forgiveness impossible.

“The rifle butt in the back,” wrote Zlatko Dizdarevic, a Bosnian journalist, “shatters everything civilisation has ever accomplished, removes all finer human sentiments, and wipes out any sense of justice, compassion, and forgiveness.” He is exaggerating, but not by much.

A Muslim woman, a teacher from Bosnia, who was a victim of the war in that blood-soaked land, gave voice to the pain of her shattered self and to the impossibility of forgiveness. Sparsely and vividly, she told the story of how hate was born in her soul during the war:

“I am a Muslim, and I am 35 years old. To my second son who was just born, I have given the name Jihad, so he would not forget the testament of his mother-revenge. The first time I put my baby at my breast I told him: ‘May this milk choke you if you forget.’ So be it. The Serbs taught me to hate. For the last two months there was nothing in me. No pain, no bitterness. Only hatred. I taught these children to love. I did. I am a teacher of literature. I was born in Ilijas and I almost died there. My student, Zoran, the son of my neighbour, urinated into my mouth. As the bearded hooligans standing around laughed, he told me: ‘You are good for nothing else, you stinking Muslim woman.’ I do not know whether I first heard the yelling or felt the blow. My former colleague, a teacher of physics, was yelling like mad, ‘Ustasha, ustasha’, and kept hitting me. I have become insensitive to pain. But my soul? It hurts. I taught them to love and all the while they made preparations to destroy everything that is not of the Orthodox faith. Jihad-war. That is the only way.”

What horrendous humiliation. A violation that mutes speech and makes rage glow like hot lava. Its memory must stab the victim’s soul the way nails pierced the flesh of the crucified. Can the mother of Jihad ever forgive? Can Jihad, who drank the milk of her vengeance, ever know anything other than revenge?

Set aside for a moment the fact that the woman was a Muslim. For now, think only of the violence and the wound it produced. How can someone with such a wound forgive? Does Christian faith have nothing better to offer to her than to demand of her to forgive her assailants? More than anything else, she needs Christ to cradle her, to nurse her with the milk of divine love, to hold her in his arms like an inestimable gem, to sing her songs of gentle care and firm protection, and to restore her to herself as a beloved and treasured being.

And that’s what Christ does. Before we forgive Christ comes to dwell in us by faith. Consider just one image the Apostle Paul used repeatedly for God’s relationship to our bodies and souls: the image of a temple. “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God,” he wrote to the Corinthians who had abused their bodies (I Corinthians vi, 19). Bodies are sacred spaces. The flame of God’s presence burns in them inextinguishably. Our bodies may be in ruins, they may even be desecrated by the excrement of human hatred and folly, and yet they are holy, sanctified unalterably as a dwelling place of the Holy One. The temples will be restored one day to their full splendour. The Apostle called this restoration the resurrection of the body. It will be completed in the world to come. But it starts in the here and now when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ makes a dwelling place in the fragile flesh of our mortal bodies.

Indwelled by Christ, will that teacher of literature be able to forgive? She may need to rage against the perpetrators and even against God for a while. But now she will rage against perpetrators in the presence of the God who cares; she will struggle with the God who seemed absent when she needed God most, all the while being cradled by God.

Eventually, the time to forgive may come. She may forgive with one part of her soul while desiring vengeance with another. She may forgive one moment and then take it back the next. She may forgive some lighter offences but not the worst ones. Such ambivalent, tentative, and hesitant attempts are not yet full-fledged forgiveness, but they are a start. If she doesn’t trample underfoot the tender plant of forgiveness that seeks to break through the crust of vengeance with which she has protected herself, if she waters that plant with the living water of God’s goodness, one day it may grow sturdy enough to bear fruit.

Notice that the seed of forgiveness may have already been there when she recounted the violation and committed herself to war as the only way. She told the story a bit like a confession, though bereft of repentance. Somewhere deep down, she knew that revenge was not right even if the thirst for it felt good. Paradoxically, it felt right because it was wrong; a wrong must be evened out by a wrong, she thought. In this implicit recognition that “the only way” was the wrong way, we get a glimpse of the seed of forgiveness.

She also recounted twice that she was a teacher of love. She still trusted in love. She was angry at her violators that she, the teacher of love, had become a creature of hate. That’s another glimpse of the seed of forgiveness that is buried under the ruins of her temple. Once the temple is rebuilt, the seed will sprout. The only question is what she will do with the tender plant.

Edited extract from Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace by Miroslav Volf (Zondervan, £7.99). This is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official Lent book for 2006.

Professor Volf is director of the Yale Centre for Faith and Culture.