Marina Cantacuzino is the founder of The Forgiveness Project. The non-profit uses storytelling to explore individual journeys towards forgiveness, particularly by those who have faced some of life's hardest trials "the murder of a loved one, the injustice of abuse, the degradation of torture. The project also hosts restorative justice programs in prisons, helping inmates to come to terms with their crimes. "I think of Andrew Rice, whose brother was killed in the Twin Towers," [said Cantacuzino]. "Rice says, you know, "those people calling loudest for retribution, are those people least affected." And I think there's something about having been there, gone there, to the darkest places that very often connect you to humanity. Accountability becomes really important, and you do find that this is where restorative justice comes in, that many victims will tell you that the most healing thing of all isn't the ten-year prison sentence, but it is the acknowledgment from the offender, that they did wrong. That they want to create a better life and make sure that it's never repeated. But I think it's important to say that forgiveness doesn't preclude or exclude justice." The [definition] I use is 'Forgiveness is making peace with something or someone that you cannot change.' I heard Fred Luskin, who's a great expert on forgiveness, say recently that ... now he's come down to freedom. Forgiveness is freedom, he says. First, you have to have compassion for yourself in order to have compassion for others, and you have to have ... emotional awareness. And that requires humility. I think it also requires courage. Because very often it's an isolating position. It's easy to judge and criticize and hold a grudge, and very often your friends and family and society want you to do that. And so it does require courage in facing your fears. It also requires a willingness to be vulnerable ... to feel the pain. There's one of the stories Camilla Carr, where she put it rather beautifully: "First you have to deal with the anger, then with tears, and only once you reach the tears are you on the road to finding peace of mind."
Latest
Latest News
Each news summary is created according to strict standards. Here's how we do it.
Each summary is created using a consistent editorial procedure. The target length is approximately 16 lines of 11-point Arial text in a 650-pixel-wide column. Up to 25% of a summary may be set in bold to emphasize the most important ideas. Summaries are composed of verbatim excerpts presented in the same sequence as they appear in the original news source, with very minor editorial additions. Where material has been omitted between excerpts, the omission is indicated with ellipses (...). Any words added by an editor for clarity or context appear in [brackets]. Our original news editor was Fred Burks. Tod Fletcher edited most summaries from 2007 through 2014, and Mark Bailey has served as news editor since 2014.