Forgiveness is one of the most-used and least-understood words in the Christian dictionary.
Most congregations use it at least twice every Sunday, when we pray a version of 'Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.'
Forgiveness is a high ideal. It's also a colossal burden and a demand that can be dreadfully damaging, particularly when well-meaning church leaders propose it as the solution to every conflict. Because forgiveness isn't just one thing. It isn't friendship, or liking, or trust. The would-be reconciler who insists that forgiveness means restoring a victim's relationship with his or her abuser has no right to do so, and is compounding the abuse. The problem is even more acute when the perpetrator doesn't believe he or she has done anything wrong, leaving the faithful Christian facing a storm of conflicting emotions.
Was Prince Charles' meeting with Gerry Adams yesterday a moment of forgiveness?
It isn't clear what they said to each other, but there was a long handshake – presumably at the instigation of the famously tactile Adams. Watching the video of that meeting was a profoundly unsettling experience. Adams, though he denies ever having been a terrorist, represented the IRA and is its long-time defender. He has never admitted that its terror campaign was wrong, seeing the IRA's victims as casualties of war and equating them with terrorists who died at the hands of the security forces.
At Mullaghmore, where the Prince is today, his beloved mentor Lord Mountbatten, Mountbatten's 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull and local boy Paul Maxwell, 15, died in an IRA explosion.
We should have no truck with attempts to create an equivalence between the deaths on each side. IRA victims – all of them – were murdered. Some victims of the British security forces were, too. The vast majority were not. So if there was a current of forgiveness flowing in that handshake, it was from the Prince to Gerry Adams.
We shouldn't over-interpret what happened. Prince Charles was doing his duty, as his mother has done so faithfully. But still: the handshake shows what a measure of forgiveness can achieve, and what it can't.
It doesn't make people friends. But at its root, it says: this is no longer between us. What happened, happened, and we will not agree on why, but it will not control or shape our future.
We don't know, of course, what was in the mind of either of them. In a sense, though, that doesn't matter: what counts is what people saw. And if they saw forgiveness, that's really important, because all over the world there are enemies who need to find a way to stop letting their past hatreds control their future. They are not just in Israel/Palestine or Iraq or Congo, either; some of them are next door to us. Some of them, even, are us.
The handshake was one thing. However, what speaks just as clearly of the need for forgiveness – and its cost – is the visit today to Mullaghmore. Particular places have a great power to move us, especially when they have been associated with great pain. Prince Charles would scarcely be human if he did not have to cope once again with all his feelings of sorrow and anger.
And that's the other thing about forgiveness: it isn't something we do once, it's something we have to do again and again – perhaps the true meaning of Jesus' words about forgiving seventy times seven.
