THE MOST MOVING of many moving encounters on Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s TV series on truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland came when a Belfast woman, Mary McLarnon, found herself face to face with the British soldier who had killed her brother. The soldier, Clifford Burrage, recounted the circumstances of the attack, and then said he was sorry. He hoped that he might be forgiven. There was something just a little too glib about his apologies, and Ms McLarnon drew back. “I haven’t got the power to forgive anyone,” she said formally, “ . . . but I thank you for telling the truth.”

Forgiveness is the hardest of all the Christian ideals to achieve, and not one that comes easily in an age that prefers to lay blame than to look for explanations. Sometimes, however, the withholding of forgiveness can become a virtue in itself — and Ms McLarnon demonstrated that. So much of Northern Ireland’s grim history has been about secrets and lies, that disinterring the truth is often a more courageous act than simply attempting to ring down a curtain on the past. The single-minded pursuit of justice, like that of the McCartney sisters, who set out to identify the men who had killed their brother, Robert, stemmed not from forgiveness, but from a burning need to confront the truth — the one became a pre-condition of the other.

“Forgive your enemies,” said John F. Kennedy, “but never forget their names.” He was saying more or less what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt thought, which was that forgiving the evil-doer went hand in hand with condemning the deed. If Simon Wiesenthal had embarked on the path of forgiveness from the outset, he would never have tracked down and brought to justice the worst of the Nazi war criminals.

Julie Nicholson, who has given up her job as an inner-city vicar in Bristol because she found it impossible to forgive the suicide bombers who murdered her daughter in London on July 7, felt that her inability to do so was incompatible with her Christian faith. “It’s very difficult for me to stand behind an altar and celebrate the Eucharist, the Communion, and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness, when I feel very far from that myself, ” she said. She was resigning “until the wounds had healed”.

Her honesty and courage in doing so struck me as coming far closer to a Christian ideal than the glib panaceas that so frequently pass for acts of forgiveness. To feel anger, even hatred, towards the perpetrator of a monstrous crime is natural and instinctive; to suppress it altogether and pretend to a fake act of forgiveness sounds more like hypocrisy. Until the truth has been unearthed and justice seen to be done, it is very hard for “the wound to be healed and the balm poured over it”, as Archbishop Tutu puts it.

I would bet that Ms Nicholson will eventually come closer to the Christian act of forgiveness than many of her colleagues who pay lip service to the notion of forgiving their enemies and turning the other cheek. Anger has helped many victims through their worst moments. That does not mean that it is a permanent condition.

In On Forgiveness Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh, writes that genuine, unconditional forgiveness is the rarest of human virtues, but that when it happens it transforms lives. When Nelson Mandela walked out of his prison, and set up a process that amounted to forgiving the agents of apartheid, he changed the history not just of his country but of an entire era. It showed that reconciliation was a possibility, that the permanent quest for vengeance was ultimately self-defeating, and that only by confronting the past was it possible to find a way of forging the future.

Forgiveness may be a rare commodity, but a failure to forgive condemns us to permanent conflict. The history of the Middle East is atrophied in blame and counter-blame. The bitterness that divides sectarian communities from the Balkans to Sri Lanka is seemingly relentless. The prisoners of Guantanamo Bay are serving sentences without any end in sight. Societies, even families, fall out and go to war over grudges that linger on long after their origins have become blurred by time. The only way of breaking the log jam is through forgiveness. “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done,” writes Arendt, “our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences for ever . . .”

What makes it so difficult, however, is that true forgiveness starts not with governments or agencies but with individuals, who may need to hear contrition or an apology from the perpetrator of a crime before they feel able to forgive him. The forgiveness is conditional. As such it falls short of the Christian ideal, but it is a way of reaching reconciliation, which may help both sides. Restorative justice, which brings both sides together in the aftermath of a crime, is very often a more effective form of punishment than prison or community service.

There is no easy way to forgive, and there is no point in thinking it can be done until the facts have been confronted and the wounds truly healed. One black woman, who testified before Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, gave evidence about the torture and murder of her husband at the hands of white police officers.

“A commission or a government cannot forgive,” she said. “Only I, eventually, could do it. And I am not yet ready to forgive.”

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