Of Faith, Forgiveness And What's 'Left To Tell'

                By Scott Chacon from Dublin, CA, USA - Ntrama Church Altar, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9746514

Isn't it hard to forgive someone when you know that they have wronged you in the most brutal way possible by humankind? Suddenly, it's not about holding grudges anymore, it's about vengeance, of vicious hatred and desire to overpower. It is very easy to cross that thin line of humanity once you are completely destroyed and broken. And do we have the right to judge that person? Can we affirm that we would not choose the same thing, given similar situations? Can we say that I am human enough to forgive the ones that killed off my entire family? Is that beyond human? Is that the divine? I am not sure. 

The reason why Immaculée Ilibagiza's story struck the right chords in my heart is because I do not know the answers to these questions. And I think as a reader, the right point to begin is when you accept it. Immaculée, now an American author and a motivational speaker, was the survivor of the Rwandan genocide. For ninety-one days, she survived with some other women in a cramped bathroom in the house of a pastor while her entire country was being savagely obliterated by armed militia.

Having seen the terror humans are capable of, after witnessing the torture your own countrymen can inflict upon you and after being betrayed by the so-called developed nations who could have interfered at the right time, the natural course of a human being might have been a slow degeneration to an existential hell or quite possibly a new and self-destructive passion leading to understanding the world as a set of unfairly constituted factions. Or, am I the one being painfully immature here?

Immaculée took a different turn, one that requires an immense amount of courage. 'Left To Tell' is not about miracles or vague spiritual realizations, nor is it a dry, lifeless chronicle of history's one of the most tragic genocides. It is about faith strengthening the human will, about surviving a trauma without draining yourself off of all humanity and love. It is about forgiving in the face of revenge and love amidst the chaos of hatred. 

It is hard to find a book about war that affirms your hope in humanity rather than destroy it. But then, wasn't it Alexander Kimel, who wrote after surviving the holocaust that,

"When it will be, I do not know, but

 Despite all the signs to the contrary.

 In the dawn of a Better World, I do believe."

Maybe, just maybe, we are all allowed to believe.