Today’s post features a conversation between Reggie Kidd and Catherine Claire Larson. Reggie Kidd is professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary and author of With One Voice: Discovering Christ’s Song in our Worship. Catherine Claire Larson, who earned an MA at RTS-Orlando, is a writer with Breakpoint, part of the Prison Fellowship ministry. As We Forgive is her first book.
RMK: Thanks, Catherine, for this elegantly wrenching book. Could you review for us what happened in Rwanda, and why the stories you capture in As We Forgive became so important to you?
CCL: On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane plummeted from the sky after being hit by a missile. It became the albatross around the neck of the Tutsi people when Hutu claimed that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (a group of mostly expelled Rwandan Tutsi on the border of Uganda pressing for return into the country) had shot it down. The most widely accepted theory today is that radical Hutu, unsatisfied with the direction of peace talks assassinated the Rwandan president. Either way, the sudden streak of a missile and the fiery light of a falling plane were a diabolical kind of fireworks that night-evil’s unseemly opening ceremonies to a hundred days of slaughter that would consume the country.
Within hours of the plane’s metal shrapnel gashing Rwandan soil, Hutu sharpened their machetes to do likewise. Radios hissed a message that “the season for slaughter” had arrived. In the days to follow, Hutu killed Tutsi and their sympathizers at a rate five times higher than mechanized Nazi gas chambers. Or to put it in the language of our own American tragedy, imagine three 9/11’s a day for one hundred days. In the course of that one hundred days almost a million Rwandans-mostly Tutsi-were killed.
The RPF did eventually make their way to Kigali to re-establish the rule of law in July of that year. But the scope of the tragedy and injustice that remained to be dealt with was almost unimaginable. How does a nation exert justice in a place where this much evil has occurred? And how does a nation establish any measure of peace? It’s difficult for the mind to fathom, especially when one considers their legal system was practically obliterated in 1994 when so many of their lawyers and judges faced brutal deaths.
I became more intimately familiar with this story when I first came to work for Prison Fellowship, the organization where I still work today. The first story I was assigned then (five years ago this March) was to write about a man named Bishop John Rucyahana. Bishop John is the chairman of Prison Fellowship Rwanda . He has helped pioneer taking the principles of restorative justice, something which is core to the mission and heart of our organization, into his homeland. As I began to hear stories of Rwandans forgiving unthinkable crimes committed against them, I wanted to know more. A few years later, a friend, Laura Waters Hinson traveled to Rwanda to film a documentary on the same subject. My curiosity only grew deeper as she shared her experiences on her return. Months later, a man by the name of the Rt. Rev. Alexis Bilingdabagabo and his wife Grace stayed at my home while they were in the states checking out graduate schools in counseling. Alexis is also a survivor of the genocide and responsible for helping to place some 8,000 orphans in families after the atrocities of 1994. I don’t have room to share how each of these experiences fanned the flame of my interest, but my burden to investigate only grew deeper.
When I actually met some of these survivors in Rwanda in August of 2007, and heard their stories for myself, I knew there was no turning back. They allowed me to share their pain, their courage, and their hope. And that’s been both a weight and a gift.
RMK: The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming — numbing, actually. The stories you tell, though, remind me that these are things that happened to my neighbors — to people just like me and my family and my friends and my co-workers. I must say — maybe it’s because of what’s been going on in my own life the last year or so — that Nelly’s story hit me in the gut. She found a strange power in extending forgiveness to the men who killed her husband. It was as though she was released from a prison of her own with the simple words: “It is enough. It is enough for you to know what you have done. ... I have forgiven you.” I was wondering, among the stories you recount, is there one that hit especially close to home for you?
CCL: I think Devota’s story was the most important for me personally. After I interviewed Devota, she unwrapped her head scarf to show me the scars of the machete across the back of her neck. When she took my hand in hers, her skin was so soft it sent chills through me just to think of a blade, and not a loving hand, coming in contact with that skin. Devota lost both of her children in the genocide. She was attacked and left for dead twice. The second time, they set her home on fire with her in it. Truly, it was a miracle that she survived.
Devota shared with me how the verse Isaiah 53:4 had been a turning point for her. It reads, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” Before the genocide, she had understood what Isaiah 53 says about Christ being the sin-bearer. But it wasn’t until she was wishing to die that she had understood Christ to be the sorrow-bearer, our pain-bearer. That reality enabled her to begin to want to live again. Eventually, letting Christ carry her pain enabled her to come to a place of forgiveness. Hearing someone like Devota who had wrestled with that much sorrow, and found the strength to overcome (1 John 5:5), gives me great hope. Today, Devota is someone who has such a spirit of joy about her. Really, just knowing her has given me greater courage to face sorrows of my past and whatever trials may come in the future.
RMK: When I pick up an “issues” book, I don’t have high literary expectations for it. Because I know you and your love for words I wasn’t terribly surprised, but I was nonetheless delighted, at the lyrical hand you brought to this work. Page after page of my copy is marked with phrases I simply wanted to hold onto ... not to mention the quotes from other writers you selected to introduce various chapters: “Envy is thin because it bites but never eats” (Spanish proverb), “Hell is empty but all the devils are here” (from The Tempest).
Perhaps the most striking literary moment for me, Catherine, came when you invoked T. S. Eliot’s powerful, “... at the still point, there the dance is” (from “Burnt Norton”) to sum up Chantal’s story. She begins with the dance of innocence at her confirmation party; her dance is taken from her when a family friend (in fact, the host of her confirmation party) murders her father; the murderer, John, eventually meets Christ in prison and is released; Chantal has “moved on,” but under a weight of bitterness; her dance is finally restored when, seeing John live repentance and finding herself unable to escape his persistent and gentle pleas for forgiveness, she relents and says simply, “John, from now, I have forgiven you.”
As We Forgive reminds me of the poetry of the gospel, of the story that grabbed Chuck Colson in prison, insisting he own what he had done and give it to the only One who could make it right and make him a new man. It’s the one true fairy-tale. Your book reminds me, and I hope many others, that that story proves itself true time and time and time again in the unlikeliest of places, in the unlikeliest of circumstances, for the unlikeliest of people.
CCL: Thanks so much Reggie. One of the things that I deeply believe is that God is the grandest of all story-tellers. I remember how much delight I used to get as a student uncovering the rich symbols of a book like Hebrews, with its types and foreshadowings, or of the chiastic structures in the Old Testament. God obviously takes a great amount of delight in literary artistry, and in narrating this grand epic in which we find ourselves.
Because of that, before I interview someone, I usually try to pray that God would show me the things he has already woven into their lives that are deeply symbolic. I think in most cases He has already done this and its just a matter of doing a little unearthing. Frederick Buechner often writes about listening to our lives--sensing God in the mundane as well as the marvelous. I guess in the end I’m just trying to listen on behalf of others. Sometimes I think we are too close to see the beauty and the symmetry of what God is doing in our own stories. As a writer, though, I always feel a rush of excitement when I discover something of that symbolism in someone’s story. I think its exciting because I realize I didn’t put it there.
RMK: I will say that I leave this book with a fresh sense of what it is to have not just a sin-bearing, but also a sorrow-bearing Savior. Thank you for giving Devota and many others a voice. I also find myself remembering Noel Paul Stookey’s song “Give a Damn,” from, um, from a by-gone folk era: “Well, the reason that you didn’t, and the reason that you won’t, is you think you got a lot to lose and the other fella don’t.” As we close this conversation, Catherine, what are your hopes for readers of As We Forgive who come to “give a damn”?
CCL: I hope that looking into one of the darkest blots on history in recent decades, and seeing how God is bringing light and redemption will give people renewed confidence for what God can do with their mess. I hope that each person reading will find just one area in their life that they need to make right, and work toward shalom in that area—maybe it’s a place where we need to admit that we’ve been callous or malicious, maybe it’s a very frightened place where we need to invite God to share in the intimacy of our deepest struggle, or maybe it’s a place of bitterness where we need to loosen the grip of a fist, and instead extend a hand of mercy.
On a really practical level, I hope people may consider giving to help the ongoing needs of reconciliation in Rwanda. I list a number of organizations in the back of my book, as well as on my website: www.asweforgivebook.com.
I also am just thrilled to support the efforts of my friend and filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson as she partners with Prison Fellowship International in the Living Bricks Campaign.This campaign is going to enable people who want to help to provide physical materials necessary for repentant participants in the 1994 genocide to use their hands to bless rather than curse. Basically, we supply the materials and they supply the man-power to build homes for survivors and their families. It’s a practical way they can demonstrate the depth of their remorse, and it’s a little glimpse of shalom as hands that once swung machetes in violence now smooth bricks of clay.
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