WASHINGTON -- To err is human, to forgive divine, wrote the poet Alexander Pope. I could not agree more. To forgive is divine. It is also next to impossible.
Yet even in today's world torn by tales of eye-for-an-eye retribution, some people manage to pull it off with amazing grace.
Two news stories offer contrasting, yet similarly illuminating, lessons in the value of that most demanding virtue, the virtue of forgiveness.
One lesson comes from the Amish of rural Pennsylvania. The other comes from a couple of street gangs in a public housing development in Washington.
On Oct. 2, a deranged gunman burst into a one-room schoolhouse in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pa. He lined up 11 young girls and shot each of them, killing five, before taking his own life.
Witnesses say the oldest girl, 13-year-old Marian Fisher, bravely said, "Shoot me first" in an attempt to buy time for the younger students.
Then, her 11-year-old sister, Barbie, who would survive with wounds in her shoulder, hand and leg, said, "Shoot me next."
The girls' families and their Amish community responded to that breathtaking violence with acts that can only be called extraordinary, at least by those of us who are not Amish. As they grieved, the Amish mounted a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit the family of the shooter with offers of food and condolences. In their Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, all deaths are "Gottes Wille," God's will, the Amish said. The killer's family members are victims too.
As painful as most of us would find it to recover from such a tragedy while bearing such a charitable attitude toward the perpetrator or his family, the Amish of Nickel Mines offer an inspiring illustration of how it can be done.
So does the other lesson of forgiveness I mentioned.
Back in January of 1997, Washington found that it had not become too jaded, after years of gang-related violence, to be shocked by the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Darryl Dayan Hall. It was the seventh homicide in two years in the Benning Terrace public housing development on the southeast side of the nation's capital. The neighborhood braced itself for a violent retaliation. Hall's killers were tried and convicted, but the expected street payback never came.
Instead, soon after Hall's death, some local ex-offenders and other men who had been working with at-risk youths took to the streets. They nudged the leaders of the two rival "crews" into mediation.
The truce talks were held on neutral turf, the downtown offices of the non-profit National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month as a conservative alternative to the civil rights movement to which its founder, social activist Robert L. Woodson Sr., used to belong.
The meeting began with a prayer. The ground rules included no guns, no profanity and no name-calling. Those were easy concessions compared with the big one that the gang-bangers had to make: no retaliation. There can be no break in the cycle of violence without forgiveness.
Now, almost a decade later, the truce has worked. Until recently, at least, there has been no resumption of gang-related homicides in Benning Terrace, and the center has helped establish other "violence-free zones" in high schools and neighborhoods across the country.
"A couple of years ago, the Department of Education commissioned a study to find a common profile of high school killers," Woodson said. "They didn't find a common profile, but they did find that the predators almost always told others what they were going to do before they did it."
The key to Woodson's program are youth advisers, who usually are young men, often ex-offenders, who establish lines of communications with at-risk teens. They listen for the "buzz" that indicates violence may be in its early developing stages and take action to stop trouble before it happens.
That's one of the many lessons I have learned from Woodson's organization as I have followed his work with community groups. If the violence with which he deals was inflicted on black Americans by white bigots, we undoubtedly would see a stampede of media accompanied by Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton and others, arriving to demand federal investigations of the "hate crimes." But white bigots don't have to kill black youths today. Black youths are doing a horribly effective job on their own.
Poor urban neighborhoods such as Benning Terrace don't usually have a lot in common with rural areas such as Nickel Mines, but they both offer a valuable lesson in how to bring peace through forgiveness. Otherwise, as we can see elsewhere in our war-torn world, the violence never ends.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail:
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