I think forgiveness is probably one of the hardest things we as Christians are called to do- it tends to be easier to forgive those who are our friends and who have let us down or done something against us. To forgive an ‘enemy’ or someone who had really damaged or hurt you or your family is a much tougher ask. However, Jesus does not give us a choice in the matter. We have to forgive- life is too short for grudges or hatred: there is enough of that already.
One person who showed how important it is to “forgive those who trespass against us” (Matthew 6:9-13) was someone who did not regard himself as a hero but undoubtedly was one. His name was Eric Lomax. He is perhaps best known for his outstanding autobiography The Railway Man (1995), which was later turned into a profoundly moving film of the same name made in 2013, starring Colin Firth as Eric and Nicole Kidman as his hugely supportive wife Patty.
Eric Lomax was someone who had an incurable interest in railways and train timetables, but things become incredibly real for him when he joined the Royal Corps of Signals with whom he was captured by the Japanese Army following the surrender of Singapore in 1942. There he, like so many others, were ordered to undertake a forced march to Changi Prison and had to work on the infamous Burma Railway- where around 100,000 allied prisoners died.
Whilst working on part of the railway he suffered horrendously at the hands of the Japanese Army’s Military Police, where he was brutally beaten, waterboarded, abused and more, before the end of the war came in 1945.
After the war like so many veterans he could not settle, and he had intense, emotional feelings and mental flashbacks about how he was treated that really crippled him as a person, and which he kept to himself. In particular he disliked the Japanese people who had beaten, interrogated, and tortured him:
“I wanted to do violence to them, thinking quite specifically of how I would like to revenge myself on the goon squad and the hateful little interrogator…I wished to drown him, cage him, to beat him to see how he liked it”
That interrogator’s name was Takashi Nagase. Over the intervening years he like Eric Lomax, had suffered since the war’s end. He would have recurring nightmares of how he had treated Eric and his role in that and other crimes. He tried to atone for what he had done by funding the creation of a Temple of Peace at the River Kwai Bridge. He also wrote a book about his feelings including recounting a spiritual experience he had in the allied war cemetery there where he felt :
“This is it. You have been pardoned”
When Eric and his wife Patty heard read this, she said her reaction was:
“I was so angry really. I just wanted to fire a gun at him”
She could not understand how Nagase could have felt pardoned without being forgiven by the person he had harmed -her husband. She wrote to Takashi Nagase asking if he would be prepared to meet Eric . His reply totally disarmed her, and she said that “her anger drained away, and in its place came a welling of compassion” for both Nagase and her husband. Eric himself, said that at that point “I lost whatever hard armour I had wrapped around me…and Forgiveness became a real possibility”.
Eventually, in 1995, they arranged to visit Mr Nagase in Thailand and then Japan where his first words to Eric were:
“I am very, very sorry” & “50 years is a long time, but for me it is a time of suffering”.
Eric realised that he had to give Takashi Nagase the forgiveness needed and later on their trip in a private meeting with him he told him:
“The war had been over for almost 50 years, that I had suffered much, and that I knew that although he too had suffered throughout this time…..that while I could not forget what happened, I assured him of my total forgiveness”.
The two of them were said to be overcome with emotion and became great friends until Nagase died in 2011. Eric Lomax died the next year, but he did live to see the making of the film based on his remarkable life.
. On the headstone of Eric Lomax’s grave is the following :
“Sometime the hating has to stop”
You can learn more about Eric and see the moment he and Takashi met again below
So, as we slowly start to recover and come out from the awful COVID-19 pandemic, it is a time for reflection. In the UK alone close to 45,000 people are believed to have lost their lives to the disease (8 of whom lived here in Princes Risborough) and many familes will know of very dear people who lost their brave battles and that they will be honoured and remembered. We all know that dealing with any kind of bereavement is an awful business and it takes time to not just come to terms with that loss, but what that person meant to you and how you honour their memory.
I was reminded of that very recently when I listened to a wonderfully reflective and meditative song called ‘Thankful’. It was written and sung by a British singer who you may not have heard of by the name of Rumer (real name Sarah Joyce) brought up as a Christian- and she is probably the finest female singer since Eve Cassidy and Karen Carpenter.
On her 2010 debut album ‘Seasons of my Soul’, ‘Thankful’ is about how, after Rumer had gone through a very difficult time in her own life where she was nursing her dying mother, she reflects on her mother’s life and the lessons she taught her daughter, sung through the four seasons of springtime, summer, autumn, and winter. She said that while writing it, she kept on singing the words ‘the forest of angels’, and then realised that was because her mother had a woodland burial and “I am standing at my mother’s grave and it is literally that- a forest of angels. I do believe in angels. I do believe that she is still here, and I just sometimes really miss her”.
It is a hauntingly beautiful song which has that rare ability to calm and ground you no matter what your situation may be. In the song, Rumer talks about the life lessons that her mother’s life and death taught her which she summed up by saying “Be thankful. I’m dead, live your life!”.
I think that is an important philosophy. It is surely our responsibility to the dead, after honouring and remembering them, that you “live your life”. We have to find a way forward and to try and put to one side the demons that ongoing negativity and depression can bring to you, and the best way to honour someone’s life is to live our own as best as you can.
That can be easier said than done of course. An important way to do that though is to spend time with God in meditation and prayer. Psalm 46:10 shows us the way when we are told:
Be still and know that I am God
Whilst we can commune with God anywhere, quite often it is in those still, quiet moments when we ground ourselves to be open to His word that we better hear His sweet voice and wisdom. In the very busy lives we live, it can feel so difficult to find the time to slow down, to centre ourselves and to wait on God. But Prayer is vitally important to our soul and that of the nation.
Meanwhile, if you feel you are unable to find that stillness, why not listen to ‘Thankful’ (below)
If you were to ask a theologian what have been the main things that turned Christianity from the small sect it had begun as, to the greatest faith the world has ever known (over 2 billion people are believed to be Christians – nearly 30% of the world’s population and more than any other religion), they tend to come up with 3 main historical events:
The impact the early Christians had in looking after and caring for all people, including those who persecuted them
The miraculous conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 AD where he saw “a cross shaped trophy formed from light”. Within a decade Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire
The power of the Christian Martyrs who were persecuted or killed for refusing to deny Christ’s divinity
An important part of my coming to faith was when one such theologian was recounting the story of one martyr by the name of Vivia Perpetua. However, the theologian broke down whilst telling the story- so affected was she by the story and what it meant to her. For someone who is trying to be objective about Christian history, that tells you something.
So, although the story of Perpetua is vague in parts thanks to her being perhaps the first ever diarist, we can still read her words today. It is believed that she lived in the early 200AD period and was from what we now regard as modern day Tunisia and she, like other Christians at that time were being persecuted by the Emperor Septimius Severus, because they refused to pay homage to him or the Roman gods.
Now Perpetua was believed to be only 22, already widowed, educated, and was a Christian but had yet to be baptised, and with 4 other Christians from her household she was arrested and thrown into prison, awaiting execution.
Perpetua though was not afraid of being killed as she had a vision one day where she saw a golden ladder, guarded by a fierce animal, she saw herself climbing it and stepping on the animal’s head. When she looked around, she found herself in a green meadow with white robed figures alongside a shepherd who welcomed her and give her food. When she awoke, she understood that she must die for Christ.
After several days in jail she heard that she and her group were to have a court hearing to decide their fate, and Perpetua’s father came to see her to beg that she make the decision to live. Perpetua looked at her father and said:
On that scaffold, whatever God wills shall happen,
For we know that we are not placed in our own power but in that of God.
Perpetua and her band of friends were given a chance to live if they were to recant their faith and honour the Roman gods. Her father continued to urge her to do that, but she said to him these extraordinary words:
Father, do you see this vase here?
“Yes, I do”, he replied
Could it be called by any other name than what it is?
“No”, he said
“Well, so too I cannot be called anything other than what I am- a Christian”
Her guards thought highly of Perpetua and her friends and she was able to be Baptised before they were taken to the roman amphitheatre where wild beasts were set on them and Perpetua at the front of them was tossed around by a fierce animal but she saw her servant Felicity wounded. She went to her, took her hand, and raised her up, and the crowd in the arena insisted they be allowed to recover.
Perpetua and her friends then came together in the centre of the area, give each other a farewell kiss of peace and all but Perpetua were run through by a sword. The young executioner who was to seal her fate was shaking and just could not do it, so she guided his hand and sword to her throat.
Perpetua like so many brave Christians down through the ages was true to God’s word. She understood The Truth and it was something that she and her companions were compelled to follow- someone wise once said that “A truth not acted upon becomes a poison”. Perpetua could so easily have followed her father’s wishes and lived on, but she knew that as a Christian she could only honour the one true God and Father. Jesus was and is real and she could not deny Him.
As Christians, we are called to carry out God’s word and work. Often, it is not an easy road we have to travel, it can be easier for us to ignore what we are being called to do but do it we must. There is nothing more urgent today then us listening to God and to follow his wishes. Perpetua showed us the way.
The ways that people come to religion and to Jesus Christ are infinite. Some like the brilliant Christian writer C S Lewis (‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ including ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’) came “kicking, struggling, resentful and darting my eyes in every direction for a chance to escape”, and had his Epiphany at, of all places, Whipsnade Zoo (“I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the Zoo I did”).
Others feel the warm embrace of God much sooner in their lives. The most beautiful story I heard was how the late (and very great) Sister and Carmelite Nun Wendy Beckett -who came to huge public notice and acclaim late in life as the most improbably of art critics in TV history through her 1990’s BBC series- met God.
For her, it happened on a Sunday morning, when she was only 3 or 4, she was sitting under her family’s breakfast table as they were eating sausages. She recalled that she could smell the sausages, she could feel the carpet and hear the local marching band and then something happened:
“And I became conscious of God. It was an overwhelming experience of greatness, of goodness and of protection. I remember feeling with wonder that the world- so bewildering to a little child-made sense and that it was God’s world, and that I was a blessed child within it. If you ask how I knew, I cannot tell you. I saw nothing and heard nothing. But from then on, God was always with me, the centre of all I did, giving it significance.”
I think also of actor and Anglican David Suchet (most famous as TV’s Hercule Poirot) who became a Christian whilst in a hotel bathtub in Washington. He had been thinking of his late grandfather:
“I always felt that he was with me as my spiritual guide. I felt him sitting on my shoulder. Then I thought to myself, ‘why do I believe that and not believe in life after death?’. That got me thinking about the most famous person who they say had a life after death, Jesus”.
It led him to read St Paul’s epistles and this is what he found:
“I chose it because I knew that somebody called Paul actually existed. I knew that he wrote letters, and that they are there for everyone to see. By the end of the letter, certainly by the end of the book, I was reading about a way of being and a way of life that I had been looking for all those years.”
I think what these examples show us is that in order to know Jesus you do not have to become very learned, or go to theological college, or have to take part in some special form of meditative practice or ritual, or even to be in a particularly holy place.
God can come to you wherever you are and whatever you are doing. It can be in the most unlikely of settings -you could be cleaning your teeth, walking around the town, or taking your children to school. But when it happens it is significant and needs your attention.
It can take time for you to believe, or as in the case of Sister Wendy above it can be instant, and it changes your life (and that of others) for ever. It is a precious thing. I pray it happens to you.
