Freedom by the Reverend Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
"No Future without Forgiveness"
"As I Listened in the Truth Council to the stories
of perpetrators of human rights violations,
I realized how each of us has this capacity for the most awful evil -- every
one of us.
None of us could predict that if we had been subjected to the same influences,
the same conditioning,
we would not have turned out like these perpetrators. This is not to condone
or excuse what they did.
It is to be filled more and more with the compassion of God, looking on
and weeping that one of His beloved
had come to such a sad pass. We have to say to ourselves with deep feeling,
not with cheap pietism,
"there but for the grace of God go I."
And mercifully and wonderfully, as I listened to the stories
of victims I marveled at their magnanimity,
that after so much suffering, in, instead of lusting for revenge, they had
this extraordinary willingness to forgive.
Then I thanked God that all of us, even I, had this remarkable capacity
for goodness, for generosity, for magnanimity.
from the book by Alan Clements "Instinct For Freedom" p.86