Forgiveness, Peacemaking, and the Courage to Reconcile | Todd Deatherage

What role does forgiveness play in the hard, often painful work of building peace? In this episode of The UpWords Podcast, host Jean Geran sits down with her longtime friend Todd Deatherage, co-founder of Telos, a nonprofit helping leaders navigate conflict and work toward reconciliation in some of the world’s most challenging places.

Drawing from decades of experience in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the American South, Todd shares why forgiveness can’t be forced — but why, when it does happen, it has the power to break open even the most entrenched cycles of hurt. From the story of Mama Callie Greer in Montgomery, Alabama, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, this conversation is for anyone wrestling with what it means to pursue peace without sacrificing justice.

What You Will Learn

• Why forgiveness is essential to peacemaking — but can never be required or rushed
• The six principles of peacemaking that guide Telos’s work around the world
• The difference between inner transformation and systemic justice — and why both matter
• The story of Callie Greer: how one woman’s act of forgiveness launched a lifetime of advocacy
• What the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa teaches us about truth, forgiveness, and communal healing
• Why forgiveness across communal lines creates space for the offender to be transformed — not just the victim
• How restorative justice works, and why the American criminal legal system leaves so little room for repair
• The meaning of shalom — and why “peace” is a pale translation
• Communal responsibility, historical injustice, and what it means to say “I’m not responsible”
• Why “hurt people hurt people” — and why healed people have the power to bring healing to the world

Guest Bio

Todd Deatherage spent ten years on Capitol Hill and six years at the U.S. State Department working on human rights and international religious freedom — where he and Jean first became friends and colleagues. In 2009, he co-founded Telos, a nonprofit that helps leaders better understand conflict and equips them to pursue reconciliation and peace in some of the world’s most difficult contexts. Telos has created experiential learning journeys in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the American South (Restory Us). Todd’s work is deeply rooted in his Christian faith and his conviction that justice, peacemaking, and forgiveness are inseparable.

Resources & Links

• Telos: telosgroup.org
• Restory Us (experiential learning in the American South): telosgroup.org
• One Day After Peace — documentary referenced in this episode
• Poor People’s Campaign (Rev. William Barber): poorpeoplescampaign.org
• Previous UpWords Podcast episode with Dr. Robert Enright on forgiveness: slbf.org/studio
• Listen and view other podcasts in the Forgivness Series: https://slbf.org/questions-of-faith-podcast-episodes

CONNECT WITH US
Subscribe to The UpWords Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and visit slbf.org/studio to learn more about our work at the intersection of faith, the academy, and the marketplace.

This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

I just think there's so many examples like that of kind of that forgiveness across communal lines. It it brings some transformation and healing to our own heart. It creates space for that. But it really opens up a space for someone else to be, you know, transformed. And that's that is such a beautiful part of forgiveness. And that's why, again, it can't it can't be forced, but when when there's an opportunity for it to happen, it really does bring transformation to the world.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, the church, and the marketplace. In previous episodes, host Gene Guerin has explored the theme of forgiveness, what it means, why it matters, and how it shapes our lives and relationships. And in this episode, the role forgiveness plays in the work of peacemaking. Jean is joined by her longtime friend Todd Dethrich. Earlier in their careers, Jean and Todd worked together at the U.S. State Department on issues related to human rights and international religious freedom. Today, Todd is the co-founder of Telos, a nonprofit that helps leaders better understand conflict and equips them to work toward reconciliation and peace in some of the world's most challenging places. Drawing from experiences in places like the Middle East, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the American South, Todd shares insights about how faith, justice, and forgiveness intersect in the hard work of building peace. Here is our conversation with Gene Guerin and Todd Dethridge.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

So, Todd, my friend Todd, welcome to the Upwards Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. One of my favorite parts of hosting the Upwards Podcast is I get to invite my wonderful friends from around the world. And you're one of them. And I know that you have content that our listeners are going to really appreciate. But a little background, since we might reference some of these things as we go, you and I work together at the State Department and on issues related to human rights, international religious freedom, foreign policy more broadly. And so we have been friends for a long time because that was a long time ago. But I'm delighted to then shift a little bit to talk more about your current work. And I also will be referencing some of our previous podcasts with Dr. Enright, our forgiveness scholar, who dealt with some of the definitional things related to forgiveness. But we are going to jump into kind of how forgiveness plays with peacemaking, which is more of your current work. But before we get there, I'd love it if you would give us and our listeners a little introduction to telos and how you started it, why you started it after your time in public service. And then if you want to also feed in a little bit how your faith prompted your choice of this work in this season of your life.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Yeah. There's just such big questions. Um and I I will be as succinct and uh give the shortest version of it that I can. But I spent 10 years working on Capitol Hill, and then I spent six years at the State Department where we met and worked together in the same bureau on human rights issues. And and I started off life as a classroom teacher, a history teacher in high school, uh, way back when. But that journey uh through public, through politics and public policy to human rights, and to then founding um a nonprofit 17 years ago or co-founding one um called Telos, it really is very mapped onto my own my own faith journey. So I came to Washington, D.C. in the 90s with a really sincere Christian faith, but a pretty thin theology uh about how to actually live that out in the world, especially in a pluralistic public square. And the deeper I kind of went on a faith journey, the more kind of a tension it created sometimes between the claims my political tribe was making on me and what I thought Jesus was asking me to how he was asking me to show up in the world. But on the positive side of that, it really what it led me to in the political arena was to look for common good kinds of approaches so that you could work across lines of difference. So uh my boss was a very conservative Republican. We worked very closely with two very liberal members of the Senate, uh, one from Minnesota and one from Wisconsin, actually. So Russ Feingold and R and Paul Wellstone were our collaborators on China human rights issues. And we did that for um a number of years in really uh beautiful and if and you know important ways. And that really gave me a vision for what it was like to live out of faith in the public square that was arguing for universal human dignity and using influence and power responsibly to support that in in the world. Right. And that led me to SAIT and to the work that that we did there in the Human Rights Bureau for a couple of years. But that also took me to the Middle East. I started to really um learn about the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the American role in it and the way our role was, our power and influence in that conflict have historically been really significant, our interventions, but our interventions haven't always been the kinds of things that actually allowed that conflict to move toward a just peace and resolution that works for everyone there, for Palestinians and Israelis and for people, and that's not been predicated on concern for universal human rights and human dignity. And the reason is that a lot of Americans care about it, and they care about it in though in very kind of zero-sum ways. They're all for sort of one side against the other, and they can't break out of an imagination that's beyond just one side has to kind of win and the other has to lose, rather than what works for one kind of has to work for everyone, or it doesn't really work at all in a in a sustainable way. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

Well, we Americans are good at choosing sides.

SPEAKER_02 5:58

Aaron Powell We're really good at that, right? Uh and it's a human it's a human thing. You know, we like to pick our team and and and there's a lot that's you know that can feel we can feel really good about doing that. But in the end, if we're serving conflict, we're making things worse, we have to really rethink. My imagination for this really stint it uh in a way that doesn't uh allow me to actually see what real flourishing requires and then how we get there. So that's what ultimately led me to collaborate with uh a guy named Greg Khalil to found to found TELUS together back in 2009 when I left the State Department. It was meant it's a nonprofit, and our work initially was just about helping American leaders, particularly Christian leaders, better understand the reality that Palestinians and Israelis lived with and the American role in that reality in ways that would redirect some of our passion and energy and resources and concern to something that actually made for a more durable, sustainable project of building peace and justice for everyone. Uh dignity, security, and freedom for everyone in equal measure was kind of the language we used. And so we did that through experiential learning trips, having having people just get proximate to the reality of people there from all persuasions and perspectives Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Christians, Muslims, um, those really committed to doing the work of peace and reconciliation, and those not at all committed to doing it, just really kind of taking the world as it is and also learning from the folks that were that had kind of a prophetic or a moral imagination for the world as it could be if we, you know, if we live differently. And so that's the work we set out to do over time. Um, it grew beyond just that case study of Israel-Palestine, and it moved in, we moved into some other issue areas, and we've created experiential learning journeys like the one we take people to the Middle East. We've also created one of those here in the US, in the American South, called Restory Us. And we have also a program in Northern Ireland and Ireland to learn about that conflict and um what worked and what didn't in their own, you know, uh peace process. And we've also been doing some work in South Africa, taking some uh groups there initially to learn about uh that reality. So again, kind of a long-winded story, but uh it this come this work has bec has been very personal for me and comes out of both my own sense of like calling and my understanding of my faith and my understanding of of what it means to be um complicit in things in the world, and then how do I how do I live with the relationships I've developed over time, especially with the deep friendships uh that I've made in different places that we work, um, just how much I feel implicated in in that reality, as particularly as an American, an American of a certain kind who um has really often been a part of a cup of communities that have wielded, you know, power and influence in ways that actually work against the things that I think to be true about how Jesus taught us to live in the world.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah, it reminds me just that last comment on as we get older and we're doing different types of work, and we've stewarded many different gifts and talents and what have you over time in our faith journey. But one of the most valuable things that we also steward are our relationships, right? And this podcast is an example one for me, right? Um, but how can we share and and grow in that and share the fruit of those those relationships? So we started, um, we this will be the last in our series on forgiveness. And if uh our listeners might recall or if they haven't listened to the podcast with Dr. Enright, I encourage them to do so. He ended beautifully, had a did a layup for this, our conversation today. And he's even worked with some of the same groups, you know, the Holy Land, Northern Ireland, and he has developed some forgiveness education curriculum for um for communities, for children, but his focus is on forgiveness education within groups. So, you know, he only worked with the Palestinians and focusing on learning to forgive in families and in within intercommunities, right? And he ended with, you know, we can't, we I've never been able to go community to community, you know, on forgiveness or peacemaking. And wouldn't it be wonderful if we could, you know, and that that just made me think about your work. And also you were very kind in um, we did a reading group here at Upper House a couple years ago on on Tim Keller's book on forgiveness. And you joined us virtually for that. And I remember asking you the question what role does forgiveness play in peacemaking? And so I'm gonna re ask that question. And and I know that you you had to think a bit about that. So share, share some of your thoughts.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

It was such a good question um uh that you asked before, and I really did have to really think more carefully about that because what I know, what I've experienced is that forgiveness is really an essential part of the work of peacemaking, but it's really tricky because you can't require it. It's such a deeply personal thing. And we've articulated six principles of peacemaking and six practices. And that has become the pedagogical frame that we use to teach peacemaking to communities and we do workshops and that sort of thing. But all of our programming is really also predicated on that and our communications generally as well. Really that comes from what we've learned from people actually doing it. So it's it I think it's you know, the we write these things, we print them out on cardstock, they're not written on stone tablets, so it's not the last word on anything, but it they it really is born of a lot of uh wisdom by people in the field doing this kind of work. And it's interesting that in our principles and practices, forgiveness isn't one of them. And it's not because that it's not important, it's it's to some extent because not everyone can. And again, it's it's such a deeply personal work that sometimes the best you can do is to create space for it to happen and to tell stories about it in ways that inspire. Because it is a person it is a very personal decision that someone makes about whether or not they are going to forgive. And yet often we get trapped in our unforgiveness. We get trapped in stories, we get trapped in realities in which there's no space in which to forgive. If you look at our criminal uh legal system today, there's almost no space at all for forgiveness, repair, and reconciliation, a whole process of all of that. It's so not predicated on that work. And yet, if you look at like the work of restorative justice, which is about creating spaces where things can be restored, it's in those spaces that victims can often extend forgiveness to perpetrators. And in doing that, the whole dynamic can change. And again, you can never, I don't think you can morally ever force someone into that space or force someone to do that. But to do it unleashes enormous power. Just stories of forgiveness are so compelling to us. I mean, you know, sometimes I'm just reading a novel or watching a movie and I find myself crying. And it's often because someone did this unexpected thing and decided to choose a different path, decided to forgive someone that, you know, that had wronged them. It really does touch something deep within us when that happens. And when we think of times that we have been forgiven, how significant that can be in shifting us and shifting how we, you know, in how we how we see things. So in that way, again, it's it's it's very important, it's very central in kind of breakthroughs in honest peace and reconciliation work. And yet you have to the best you can do sometimes is create the space and to and to tell the stories. And that's often how I approach it is though in those two ways.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Well, and I think when we uh spoke about this before, you sort of even said or took it as far as because I agree with everything you said, and it fits perfectly, by the way, with what Dr. Enright shared about the process, you can't rush it, people reach different points at different times, it's not linear, all those good things, right? And he walked us through all of that. But I think what struck me when you first said uh when you first spoke with us was almost the need, you know, if you think about the Palestinians and Israelis, right? The need to actually not only not list it as one of your principles, but almost completely set it aside, forgiveness. Because of that, people aren't ready for it, especially in these very early days, post-conflict, in conflict, you know, trying to get to peace. We have to put it aside because we we might be able to make peace if we put it aside. But if we try to try to integrate it too soon, everything falls apart. I mean, peacemaking's hard anyway, right? Dr. Enright said that too. I mean, he would get speaking to a group of Israelis or Palestinians, and he's done both. He was only encouraging forgiveness within their own community, but people kept jumping to, you can't ask us to do this, right? You know? So um so maybe talk a little bit about what your principles are, and then we'll we'll come back to forgiveness after that.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

Yeah. We always talk about peacemaking as being both an internal and an external exercise. And I think that's that's really important. That what it's sub it's separated a little bit from doing justice in the world. So there's a way in which a lot of people talk about peace and peacemaking in really unserious ways. In fact, for a long time we didn't even use the language of peace and peacemaking to describe our work. Because, you know, people who like peace and all that also like rainbows and unicorns and, you know, listening to the bad poetry readings. I mean, like it's like a, you know, it's not there's n there's an unseriousness sometimes that comes with what people think of when they hear the word peace, because our English translation of that ancient Hebrew word shalom is very anemic compared to what shalom really is, which is a word that is almost beyond words to actually give, you can barely give definition to shalom, but it's that like wholeness and unity of the original creation order, harmony, where every, you know, men and women live in right relationship with God and each other and the planet in flourishing injustice and peace, and the the glue that holds all of that together is the relationship between all those things and the interconnectedness between those things. And so when you're when you're making peace, what you're really doing is kind of reordering, trying to reorder a very shattered shalom, a shattered reality, and you're bringing those shards back together into wholeness, and you're holding that, and you're in relationship is really central in all of that. And so you can't work for peace without working for justice, but you can kind of be a justice advocate without really having you done the the interior work of that was required to do honest peacemaking. Um and so that's why I think this notion of like dealing with your own stuff is where you often start. It doesn't stay there. You also it's it's meant to be lived out and poured out into the community and into the your relationships, but you have to start with your own stuff. Uh just like hurt people, hurt people, healed people also have the ability to bring healing into the world. And so that's kind of where we start. And that's why a lot of our work has been about creating space for transformation, getting people proximate to difficult realities, to other people that are different from them, or to situations in which they may have some complicity and not be aware of it. Getting them into situations where they're made somewhat uncomfortable, but where they have ability to see something differently. Jesus talked a lot about when if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, you use that phrase a lot. And one of the things that we have really tried in our own way to do is to find ways to get people in a place where they have the potential to see something and to see maybe the humanity of someone else, or to see again their own some of their own complicity in something, which is not the same thing as blaming a victim, but it's just like understanding your own kind of participation in certain kinds of systems that may, you know, be really dysfunctional or un unjust, or the way you may have benefited from these things, whatever. Just you know, there's a lot of different things that you can you might be able to see, but but getting getting into that space is really important. And that's one of the things that we I think have done best at is creating those experiences for people. And that opens people up, then okay, then what what is mine to do? And that can take people on a journey toward forgiveness for sure. That's a thing that they're really wrestling with, then that's something they have to actually deal with before they can effectively kind of respond to the world around them.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

Yeah, and Dr. Enright also uh sort of walked us through I was gonna ask you, where does justice fit in? And you just you started answering it already. Um and I asked a similar question to him, even as we as he was explaining the process, the internal process that people go through. Well, you know, it doesn't mean you forgive and forget the injustice is always gonna be wrong and injustice, but he sort of brought it around in a parallel way to we all should keep doing justice and fighting for justice. And that needs to be part of the process, right? But he's found in his experience that as if people are able to go through that inner person or that personal internal process of forgiveness as part of their work in justice, they fight for justice with a different heart. You know, their approach to it is different. And and by the way, it's a better heart posture for themselves, not even it's probably way more effective to bring justice as well, but it's also um empowering and healing for them, which allows them to probably persevere longer in the fight for justice. I don't know. That's that's my own hypothesis, right? But um, I think you when you spoke again before, I was struck. You used an example, and it might illustrate this internal, external a little bit of a woman in the South who I think, I believe her son was murdered and she she was able to forgive, and then she became quite a justice warrior, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:13

I I yeah. I think, I mean, you know, telling other people's stories always is something you have to really steward well. Uh, but this woman is a dear friend of mine, and she's um definitely given me permission to tell her story. Um and she's just one of the women I admire most in in this work, but just also in life, in the world. She's sure. Um her name is Callie Greer. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and she had a really difficult life and lived a number of years on the street with a drug addiction, and was kind of miraculous, and not kind of. She was miraculously rescued from this life by a a chaplain um named Curtis Browder uh Browder, who was um, you know, working with people in uh on the street and was trying to he had to create a halfway house. And uh actually his claim to fame was he was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Al in Pointed in the state of Alabama, but he had a lot of ministries, and one of them was just kind of helping get people off the street, and he was trying to get her off the street for a long time, and she was not interested in and uh one day she was she was about like almost left for dead, and he he brought her into the halfway house, and without any kind of treatment or at all, she was miraculously delivered from her addiction. And you know, that's not most people's story, but it really did happen to her. And she had some sense from the very beginning of what had happened and the weight of this and kind of the responsibility that came with it and how how grateful she was for being delivered in her own way being forgiven. But she'd wasted a lot of years. She had uh four children and and spent a you know, she'd wasted a lot of time of being separated from children, so she's reuniting with these kind of now adult children. And not many weeks literally after this, her son was murdered in a shooting in the streets of Montgomery, uh just gun violence in a very senseless act. And she was the spokesperson for the family who went to the to the sentencing um uh hearing and to give testimony about what to do. And she decided that she was going to forgive this young man. That um and and her way of kind of her logic around this to was just that, you know, I I have been forgiven so much, how could I not be also extend forgiveness? And so she did out and uh and some of her family obviously couldn't get there for all the obvious reasons, but that because they they caught the guy, they knew he did it, there was no question about it. And so she told the judge, she said, I have, you know, you do what you need to do, that's your job, but do not put him in prison for the rest of his life because I'm demanding it, because I have I have forgiven him. And I my hope is that he just never does something like this again, but that he's allowed to have a life. And the judge really listened to her and gave him a really, a really reduced sentence. And a few years later, she's on the street in Montgomery, and someone comes up to her and starts speaking to her and thanking her, and she didn't even know who it was, and it turned out it was the young man who'd killed her son, and she realized in that moment how much that forgiveness had been a gift of God to her in in so many ways. Who forgets the face of the son who killed your child? And yet she didn't even remember this guy's face. And she knew that it was this, you know, miraculous thing in in many ways. But what she says to people all the time is don't waste your pain. It costs you too much. I mean, that's just such basic down home therapeutic advice, right? Do not waste your pain. And a lot of people do. They their pain brings them down and they become, you know, um, they reduce themselves to, you know, to just anger or despondency, or, you know, there's all sorts of things that ways that we can respond to tragedy and pain. And they're all understandable. I mean, that that this is not a judgment, but this notion of not wasting your pain, and for her it was forgiveness. And and so now she's this amazing advocate against gun violence, and she works with mothers. She has a group of mothers who are who've lost children to gun violence, and she's an advocate against gun violence. She also lost a child, another child, a grown woman, uh, a daughter who had breast cancer and had no access to primary care. And so she was only being treated in an emergency room, and in fact, wasn't being treated, and and was not able to even see um um an oncologist until it was too late, until she had was in such an advanced state of breast cancer that she died. And so she lost, you know, another child to a very unjust health care system. And that's the other thing that she works on is health care reform and ask access to primary care for all sorts of people. So she's with, you know, part of the Poor People's Campaign that Reverend Barber leads, and she does a lot of stuff like that. But she's an amazing woman, but it really all it in so many ways, it starts with this very, very personal decision that she made that many people could not understand at the time and still maybe can't, of offering forgiveness to this young man who had, you know, had didn't ask for it and did nothing to deserve it. But and I think there's a way in which sometimes forgiveness can really often come out of our own self-interrogation and our own awareness of our own our own need for it. And the more we can appreciate our need for it, the more likely we are to extend it. And so there's kind of a cultivation of humility and a self-interrogation that can be tools to help us get to a place where it may be possible for us to do it. And when it and then again, when we can get there, it does create a space for something different to happen. It may not always work, but it really does create it jams something into the gears of the whole system and it makes it transforms things, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 25:47

It really does, yeah. You're listening to the Upwards Podcast. If this conversation has been meaningful to you, consider sharing this episode with a friend, leaving a review, or subscribing in your favorite podcast app. It's one of the best ways to help others discover these thoughtful conversations. Now, let's return to Jean Guerin's conversation with Todd Detrich.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Well, and that part of the story just triggered something in my own mind of um she probably never forgave the healthcare system. Or I hope she didn't. Yeah, yeah, she's not sure that. Well, and I just, you know, I mean, that's the other level. And you know, it's almost impossible even to think about that, you know. And my own, I just had a uh journey with cancer and I had to fight my health insurance company. And man, I was doing well in lots of ways, but I was so angry that I had to do that in the midst of of being very sick, you know. So I I can only imagine. I would also imagine, though, that even her ability to forgive in that interpersonal way, much more important and profound, but even still gave her a different heart.

SPEAKER_02 27:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Maybe more anger even at the healthcare system. But I guess what are your thoughts? And this gets us a little closer to, you know, the hope for or is it even possible for reconciliation between groups, right? Between whole groups, because you can't it's harder to forgive a whole group of people. Um, but maybe start with the system thing. Um and then and then maybe we can move on to, you know, real peace and reconciliation between groups of people.

SPEAKER_02 27:34

I mean, I think systems of power, the, you know, the way we organize ourselves, the institutions that that govern us and guide us and that we shape are just reflections of who we are. So they can be more just or less just. I mean, they're, you know, but they're this notion that there's no such thing as systemic injustice is just it's built on some false reality that systems are somehow separate from the people that create them. I mean, we're all flawed human beings. We all, you know, do we can all exp you know reflect God's image in the world and do beautiful things, but we are also sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who can do really self-interested and even violent things. And we create the systems that we're talking about. And so we we bring all that to the table. And I think systemic change is really a lot of the work that you have to do to make the world more fair and just and whole for people who are vulnerable, um, for sure. And I I know that um kind of coming from the more conservative world I'm part of, often the work of repair and reconciliation is always it just has it stays at the level of interpersonal. So, you know, like you deal with people as individuals, but you don't like systems can't really be, you know, that's not where your energy's at. But I do actually think that's where a lot of the work has to be done. I think you can do that work to make systems more fair and more just and more whole and more, you know, responsive to universal human dignity and vulnerable people without the work of forgiveness. But I think the people trying to bring the change to the system in particular have an obligation, again, to do this internal work as well as the external work and be the kind of people that bring generative things into the world. Because, again, you know, as we know, hurt people hurt people, but people who have gone through transformational healing journeys have the ability to be transformational in the world around them as well. And we've seen that. Like, you know, we've I just told you about uh about Callie Greer, but we we've all known people who've, you know, who are more generative in the way they live in the world and they've chosen a different path, and then they bring, whenever they show up, they bring something different, right? And we've also known people who are just so deeply wounded and they just keep transferring their traumas onto others around them. And that's a that's a very normal thing, too. It's actually more normal, I think, than the other. But I I do think forgiveness is just this, again, creating the space for it is really does create the ability for people to be bring transformation into the world in systemic ways. But it's really tricky to know how to kind of like how much to press in that direction. Like when they created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in in South Africa after apartheid, there was some real debate about do you introduce forgiveness into this or or not? And they they they didn't. And so people could just, as long as people came forward and told the truth and confessed their crimes, not they didn't there was no accountability, there was no forgiveness, there was just it was just like it was just truth. And there's a lot of critique of that now. But at the time there were so many people whose children and family members had been disappeared by the state, and they just wanted to know. They just needed information, and that information was never going to come forward unless there was a kind of a, you know, this kind of a process. But uh one of the stories that comes out of that, I think, is illustrative of how change can happen in an intercommunal way around um forgiveness. And this is not someone I know. It's I uh one of my closest friends is knows this, these, these people and has told this story, and it's in a there's a film about it, even that really uh is public information now. But there was a a woman um in South Africa, a white woman, and her name was Jen Ferry, and her daughter, Lindy, was like a young college student, and she was in a pub one night in Cape Town. It was at the end of the apartheid era, but it there was still, it was before, you know, before everything had changed. And the uh one of the ANC uh militant groups set off a bomb and killed some people in this horrific bombing of just some innocent civilians, mostly college kids. And she goes forward to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and she kind of confronts the the men who had done this, and because they're confessing their crimes, and there was no you know, no remorse and and at all, but she goes forward and you know and does her thing, but she makes the decision to forgive them, and particularly this one man who had kind of ordered the whole thing. And he was a in the post-apartheid world, he was had become kind of he'd written a book, and he was out there in involved in politics in post-departheid South Africa, and was without any public sense of remorse at all for anything that he had done in terms of you know taking human life in his fight for freedom. And so she confronted him one day. She went to like he was at a you know, a book signing or something in a bookstore, and she went and confronted him and said, I'd really like to meet with you. And they sat down to meet, and in this meeting, she told him that she forgave him. And she said to him, and this there's a in this film, it's called One Day After Peace, which is really hard to get. It's it's made by a couple of Israeli filmmakers and it's a beautiful documentary, but it's harder to get than it should be. Um But in this film, she says to him, you know, like I'm they're they're filming this conversation, and she's, you know, saying, I forgive you, and and she said, I wanted you to be a devil with horns. I didn't want you to be like this person that I really am intrigued to get to know, basically. And what he says later is that her forgiving him freed him from the prison of his own inhumanity. You know, he was generationally oppressed as a black South African, living under an incredibly unjust system. And so every justification for, you know, being involved in the work of liberation for himself and his people and all that, and had taken to the point that also he could excuse any everybody on everybody who's white in South Africa's complicit in this system, so there are no innocent victims kind of thing. And so he felt like he was kind of on a moral high ground and felt no, you know, seemed to feel no challenge to that. When she forgives him and has this and kind of builds this relationship with him, he says it freed him from from this prison of inhumanity that he had had sealed himself in. And and then the two of them be doing start doing, you know, joint things together. She goes to his township and she really starts to learn more about the whole experience of apartheid, and then they begin to speak together publicly and they, I mean, they do some amazing things together. But the point in that is that, you know, like it it really opened both of them up to be very different people and to be such effective advocates within their own communities and as they work jointly to bring about a more whole and reconciled South Africa uh post-apartheid because of because of this. And if she had not offered him that forgiveness, you know, I th he would have been a very I think he'd have been a very different person. And and I think he would have still, you know, made some important contributions perhaps, but I think he just was a very different person because of that. And so I just think there's so many examples like that of that forgiveness across communal lines or that uh really di does not just it certainly makes the person who forgives, it it brings some transformation and healing to our own heart. It creates space for that. But it really opens up a space for someone else to be transformed. And that's that is such a beautiful part of forgiveness. And that's why, again, it can't be forced, but when there's an opportunity for it to happen, it really does bring transformation to the world. And again, that going back to our own kind of criminal legal system in America, that's just not a it's not in in anywhere in the calculation that we would imagine even trying to create a space in which it might be possible. In fact, those who do restorative justice work often have to work, have to fight really hard against the system to try to create those spaces. Uh but it's not uh it's built into our system in any way, generally.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Yeah. Well, we talked about reconciliation after forgiveness or as part of forgiveness is also optional, right? And with Dr. Enright, you know, we we go through and there are times when uh he advocated for the fact that you can always forgive, no matter if someone repents or you know, asks for forgiveness. They don't do that, they are not remorseful, they think all the things you can still forgive that person, you know, as part of your own healing and also our call from the Lord, right, to follow Jesus' example and forgive and all the good things that come from that, but that reconciliation is not necessarily even the right thing to do, even if you wanted to do it, if people are not in the place to move forward. And then, of course, protective boundaries, you know, for domestic abuse and what have you, you know, there are times when you shouldn't even go there. And that's okay because you're still you're taking that step to forgiveness. But your story that you just shared is interesting because she not only forgave, but she took steps toward reconciliation before he even was remorseful.

SPEAKER_02 36:27

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

So not only did she forgive, but she took that next step, which you may or may not want to do in a given situation, but she did. And then that softened his heart, his own heart.

SPEAKER_02 36:38

Um she claimed her own agency to do that. And I think so often we imagine our our withholding things like forgiveness is somehow punishing of someone. And in fact, we're the only ones being punished by that. And again, I'm I'm just not I don't want to be sound cheap about this at all. Forgiveness is a deeply personal thing. And I'm if somebody's not getting there, I'm not here to judge them for not getting there. Absolutely. But what I'm saying is that yes, we we have it kind of wrong. We do have agency and we do have the power somehow to sometimes just say, irrespective of how you're going to respond or are responding or will respond to this, I'm doing this. And in some ways, we don't do it for them, we do it for ourselves. And I think that's what Mama Callie will say, and I think most forgiveness experts will talk about that, is that we forgive for ourselves. Fanny Lou Hamer, uh, the great civil rights leader, says something like, Um, how can I expect to stand before God one day and and hate my brother? Like, she had plenty of reasons to hate people who were so, I mean, she was brutally beaten within an inch of her life, and she lived for you know her whole life under an incredibly corrupt and unjust system in, you know, Sunflower County, Alabama or Mississippi. And yet she refused to hate, and that really worked itself out in ways that were so beautiful, but she, in some ways, that she had this insight that, like, I'm doing it for myself. I want to be able in humility to stand before God. And uh, I think that's also an insight sometimes that we think that somehow we're giving something to someone that they don't deserve when we're actually in in many ways, we're kind of doing it for our own, for the s the health of our own soul.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

Yeah. And it as you were talking earlier about faith and peace not being uh peacemaking not being a soft thing, right? Or something to be made light of, it made me think of the scripture, you know, Jesus is a prince of peace. And people often have sort of uh soft, airy, fairy views of Jesus too, that he wasn't, you know, strong and principled, but he was all of that, right? He was the prince of peace in a way that brought righteousness and justice that he, you know, his kingdom has, right? So holding all of that together, um, and it also made me think on the softer side, or what softens it for me is is our responsibility to be channels of that peace. Yes, right. And if we're channels of that peace in our communities, I think another podcast on shame, so issues of shame and lack of forgiveness both can serve as blockages, you know, impediment obstacles to our own ability to be those peacemakers in our own communities.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

The work of peacemaking is often about jamming something in the gears of a system that just keeps as I said, hurt people, hurt people. Traumatize people continue to transfer their traumas if they're not healed, and violence begets violence. And we we know all these maxims to be true and we see them play out. And so these things take on a life of their own unless somebody's willing to jam something into the system. And forgiveness can be one of those really one of the most significant things that brings disturbance into that system. Because what it is is a breaking into the kingdom of God into a, you know, into a broken system. That makes that the kind of holy disruption that can be kind of the launching ground for transformative change. And so that's why like these things have to be cultivated and they have to be honored and appreciated, and they and they can't at the same time be coerced, as we keep saying. But I think we don't often tell enough stories of forgiveness in honest ways that can really kind of cultivate our moral imagination for what that looks like. You know, I I think that's a that is a part of it. I mean, there's a lot of cheap forgiveness stories that make people feel like, you know, again, coerced or whatever, but there's just a lot of beautiful, powerful stories that we can tell about how to live in the world that shows how this, when it's honestly done and fought for and lived out, it really does have have the ability to allow the kingdom of God to break in and bring change into broken relationships and communities and systems.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

And I think we've been talking a lot, and I I think it's because it is the best way. I love the holy disruption, that it was beautiful. But the internal to external, I think is the most effective and the best way to go. But what are your thoughts on this more kind of macro level of nation to nation or ethnic group to ethnic group of issues of apology and or restitution? Yeah. And how do you deal with that in your own work? I was thinking of the uh example in Japan of the Korean comfort women after World War II. And it was quite a process, right? Yeah. Asking the government of Japan to apologize. And then, you know, what is what does that look like? And of course, I'm sure lots of cultural differences in how groups of people would handle that question. But I'm just wondering your thoughts on on that.

SPEAKER_02 41:41

Oh, I have so many thoughts on that. I mean, we're, you know, we're we're in an era in the United States where it's really out of fashion to be apologetic about anything. Um we have to live with this fiction that America is, you know, this kind of divinely um inspired nation that just goes from strength to strength and and just don't look back in any way with a critical eye because that somehow is uh you know undermining of the of our greatness. I don't I mean, I really am struggling in this moment to know how to best introduce back into people's thinking that we work with this uh you know, this idea that that it's the truth that will set you free. It is like being honest about our reality. It's about engaging in the work of repair and repentance and apology and forgiveness. That's what actually allows us to grow and to not be honest about our own story is just such a dishonest thing. And it's such, it builds, it builds such a false reality and it keeps traumatized people in states of trauma when we, you know, and and and then just simple acts of forgiveness, especially when they're backed up by something tangible, really do have the power to just break people open and give them a space to heal within. And that's a beautiful thing, it's a good thing, and it's something we should all be kind of working for. So it's it's a moment where this kind of thing is really out of fashion, but we are at our peril not being willing to just acknowledge our own story, our own history in ways that you know you know, in our own country. And then, you know, yeah, that so I think it just applies in so many ways around the world as we think about how to how to deal with conflict, how to deal with power dynamics, all those sorts of things. Just this somehow this notion that we just have nothing ever to apologize for uh personally or as a community or as a nation is such a it's it's just such a misshapen view of how the world actually should work.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

And even if we weren't, you know, you get the response often, well, I didn't create slavery, I didn't own slaves, so why should I apologize for that particular injustice, right? Which is so critical in our own country, right? While that and Native Americans American. So both of those things, right? But if we do really believe we're called to forgive, we're called to be channels of peace, we're called to follow in Christ's example, none of that really matters. You know, and we are still compli and complicit. That's also a, you know, not use that puts people off too, but we are part of these systems that grew from those those scars in our history, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 44:25

And I think it, I mean, you know, one of the defining characteristics of being American has always been this commitment to individualism. And there's parts of that have that have really served us well, but there's parts of that that are real that's really disconnected us from a proper understanding of of the shalom of God. I mean, the shalom of God is, as I said earlier, I think it's all about relationship. The things that are held together are all held together by relationship. Men and women, right relationship with God, each other, and the natural world. And so none of us are just individuals. We we all are part of communities and we all are connected to others. And what we fail to often see is how much my flourishing is really directly tied to the people around me. And so if nobody's free until everybody's free, is the, you know, again to quote Fannie Lou Hamer again, but it's this idea that I can't want for myself and people like me what I won't work for for my neighbors. And so I may not personally be responsible for historic things that have happened in the United States, and I'm not responsible for all those things, but communally, we are responsible for what we've done and where we are, and we are responsible to be attentive to the legacies of those things that are still with us and to the wounds that people still carry and that communities still carry, and to the injustice that's been kind of built into systems ever since then. We have responsibility for that. And we can do it in a way of like I'm doing it for my neighbor, or we can do it because it's in our own interest. Both those things are true because we we're all bound up together in this. And the more we can see that, the more we're able to then not, you know, be so offended when someone says something about, you know, something that happened a long time ago and and my ancestors weren't even here then or whatever. I hear this all the time. But I just think it's it's a it's a different understanding of of what flourish how we get to flourishing, and it the more we can appreciate rooted in that vision of the shalom of God, and that's what the kingdom of God is about, and that's the work that Jesus is ultimately doing and will in some time bring to fruition, but that that's the that's the kingdom breaking in now is this is this sense of this work of shalom in which we are living these interconnected lives and understanding our mutuality and our connectedness to each other.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

And I think that's a great way to kind of bring us to a close. And it reminds me also of previous podcasts where it seems like we always come back to love your neighbor as yourself. Start there, start with the proximate, our friend Steve Garber's new book, right? Uh hope in the proximate. And that's where we can. I I I like you, I mean, I'm imagining you, and you referenced it a little bit in the beginning, are struggling in this moment of time with the larger levels, the national, the international, global levels. But all of us can love our neighbors and be better at loving our neighbors in our own communities through our existing relationships, some of which may be global, right? Or international or represent that at least. So the shalom of God and holy disruption. I love that. Thank you, Todd. Thank you for being with us.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_01 47:42

Thank you, Gene. In this episode, host Gene Garin spoke with Todd Dethrich about the relationship between forgiveness and the work of peacemaking. Their conversation reminds us that while forgiveness is deeply personal, it can also interrupt cycles of hurt and open unexpected paths toward justice, reconciliation, and healing. To hear more conversations like this, subscribe to the Upwards Podcast in your favorite podcast app and visit slbf.org slash studio. Until next time, keep looking upward and living with purpose. Go in peace.