Over this past year, I’ve reflected, as Pope John Paul II has called on Catholics everywhere to reflect, on the new millennium that has been rising to meet us. And now it’s finally here. The time for preparation has come and gone, and this new stage in our journey homeward is already starting to unfold.

Forgiveness and reconciliation have been the twin themes at the center of the Holy Father’s messages to the world these last several years. His message to Christians and non-Christians, to the head of state and to the man in the street, to everyone, has been: “Forgive one another. Seek forgiveness from those whom you have wronged, and offer forgiveness to those who have wronged you.”

In his message for the January 1, 2000 World Day of Peace, Pope John Paul said, “The Great Jubilee is inseparably linked to this message of love and reconciliation, a message which gives voice to the truest aspirations of humanity today . . . . In the century we are leaving behind, humanity has been sorely tried by an endless and horrifying sequence of wars, conflicts, genocides and ‘ethnic cleansings’ which have caused unspeakable suffering: millions and millions of victims, families and countries destroyed, an ocean of refugees, misery, hunger, disease, underdevelopment and the loss of immense resources....

“To the young people who, unfortunately, have known the tragic experience of war and who harbor sentiments of hatred and resentment I address this plea: make every effort to rediscover the path of reconciliation and forgiveness. It is a difficult path, but it is the only one which will enable you to look to the future with hope for yourselves, your children, your countries and all humanity.”
This consistent call to forgiveness that the pope has given us has taken many forms. “Forgive debts,” he has challenged governments, in many cases with surprisingly successful results. “Forgive your persecutors,” he has gently encouraged the many millions of Christians who live under harsh, even deadly, circumstances in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere where oppression, violence, and death coil around them. “Forgive one another,” has been Pope John Paul’s plea to Catholics and Orthodox. His hope is that the wellspring of mutual forgiveness will break forth in a fountain of genuine, permanent reconciliation for the two Churches.

For years now, the pope has been a modern-day John the Baptist, calling on each of us to prepare the way of the Lord, to make straight His path. As we stand in the doorway of the new millennium, with a renewed mission of evangelization before us, let’s take to heart the Holy Father’s exhortation to forgive others and to seek forgiveness for sins we’ve committed against them.
To help crystallize the reality of what it means to forgive, let me share with you a true story of a young woman’s forgiveness and loving courage in the face of a personal catastrophe. It has been an object of reflection for me since I first read it. This letter she wrote, as she walked with Christ along that lonely road to Calvary, summarizes what the pope has been saying about the urgent need for us to forgive others, of the immense power of forgiveness.
Her name is Sister Lucy Vertrusc, a young nun from the former Yugoslavia. Her words, written just a few years ago during the war there between the Serbians and Bosnians, have taught me a lot about what it means to forgive the way Christ does. This is an excerpt from a letter she wrote to her superior. I think it is worth meditating upon as we search the dark corners of our own hearts where anger and jealousies and grudges make their nests. Her story can help us see the power of love.

I am Lucy, one of the young nuns raped by the Serbian soldiers. I am writing to you, Mother, after what happened to my sisters Tatiana, Sandria, and me.
Allow me not to go into the details of the act. There are some experiences in life so atrocious that you cannot tell them to anyone but God, in whose service I had consecrated my life nearly a year ago. My drama is not so much the humiliation that I suffered as a woman, nor the incurable offense committed against my vocation as a religious, but the difficulty of having to incorporate into my faith an event that certainly forms part of the mysterious will of Him whom I have always considered my Divine Spouse.

“Only a few days before, I had read Dialogues of Carmelites and spontaneously I asked Our Lord to grant me the grace of joining the ranks of those who died a martyr for Him. God took me at my word, but in such a horrid way! Now I find myself lost in the anguish of internal darkness. He has destroyed the plans of my life, which I considered definitive and uplifting for me, and He has set me all of a sudden in this new design of His that I feel incapable of grasping. . . .
“It was already daytime when I awoke and my first thought was the agony of Christ in the Garden. Inside of me a terrible battle unleashed. I asked myself why God had permitted me to be rent, destroyed precisely in what had been the meaning of my life; but also I asked myself to what new vocation He was calling me.

“I strained to get up, and helped by Sister Josefina, I managed to straighten myself out. Then the sound of the bell of the Augustinian convent, which was right next to ours, reached my ears. It was time for nine o’clock matins. I made the sign of the cross and began reciting in my head the liturgical hymn: At this hour upon Golgotha’s heights, / Christ, the true Paschal Lamb, / paid the price of our salvation.

“What is my suffering, Mother, and the offense I received compared to the suffering and the offense of the One for whom I had a thousand times sworn to give my life? I spoke these words slowly, very slowly: ‘May your will be done, above all now that I have no where to go and that I can only be sure of one thing: You are with me.’ Mother, I am writing not in search of consolation, but so that you can help me give thanks to God for having associated me with the thousands of my fellow compatriots whose honor has been violated, and who are compelled to accept a maternity not wanted. My humiliation is added to theirs, and since I have nothing else to offer in expiation for the sin committed by those unnamed violators and for the reconciliation of the two embittered peoples, I accept this dishonor that I suffered and I entrust it to the mercy of God.

Do not be surprised, Mother, when I ask you to share with me my ‘thank you’ that can seem absurd. In these last months I have been crying a sea of tears for my two brothers who were assassinated by the same aggressors who go around terrorizing our towns, and I was thinking that it was not possible for me to suffer anything worse, so far from my imagination had been what was about to take place.

“Every day hundreds of hungering creatures use to knock at the doors of our convent, shivering from the cold, with despair in their eyes. Some weeks ago, a young boy about eighteen years old said to me: ‘How lucky you are to have chosen a refuge where no evil can catch you.’ The boy carried in his hands a rosary of praises for the Prophet [Muhammad]. Then he added: You will never know what it means to be dishonored.

I pondered his words at length and convinced myself that there had been a hidden element to the sufferings of my people that had escaped me as I was almost ashamed to be so excluded. Now I am one of them, one of the many unknown women of my people, whose bodies have been devastated and hearts seared. The Lord has admitted me into his mystery of shame. What is more, for me, a religious, He has accorded me the privilege of being acquainted with evil in the depths of its diabolical force.

“I know that from now on the words of encouragement and consolation that I can offer from my poor heart will be all the more credible, because my story is their story, and my resignation, sustained in faith, at least a reference, if not example for their moral and emotional responses. All it takes is a sign, a little voice, a fraternal gesture to set in motion the hopes of so many undiscovered creatures.

“God has chosen me — may He forgive my presumption — to guide the most humble of my people towards the dawn of redemption and freedom. They can no longer doubt the sincerity of my words, because I come, as they do, from the outskirts of revilement and profanation....

“That night, in which I was terrorized by the Serbs for hours and hours, I repeated to myself these verses, which I felt as balm for my soul, nearly mad with despair. And now, with everything having passed and looking back, I get the impression of having been made to swallow a terrible pill.

Everything has passed, Mother, but everything begins. In your telephone call, after your words of encouragement, for which I am grateful with all my life, you posed me a very direct question: What will you do with the life that has been forced into your womb? I heard your voice tremble as you asked me the question, a question I felt needed no immediate response; not because I had not yet considered the road I would have to follow, but so as not to disturb the plans you would eventually have to unveil before me. I had already decided.

“I will be a mother. The child will be mine and no one else’s. I know that I could entrust him to other people, but he — though I neither asked for him nor expected him — he has a right to my love as his mother. A plant should never be torn from its roots. The grain of wheat fallen in the flu-row has to grow there, where the mysterious, though iniquitous sower threw it.
“I will fulfill my religious vocation in another way. I will ask nothing of my congregation, which has already given me everything. I am very grateful for the fraternal solidarity of the Sisters, who in these times have treated me with the utmost delicacy and kindness, especially for never having asked any uncareful questions.

“I will go with my child. I do not know where but God, who broke all of a sudden my greatest joy, will indicate the path I must trod in order to do his will. I will be poor again, I will return to the old aprons and the wooden shoes that the women in the country use for working, and I will accompany my mother into the forest to collect the resin from the slits in the trees....

“Someone has to begin to break the chain of hatred that has always destroyed our countries. And so, I will teach my child only one thing: love. This child, born of violence, will be a witness along with me that the only greatness that gives honor to a human being is forgiveness.”

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