FORGIVENESS AND RECONCILIATION - #8

Reconciliation can be seen from personal and social perspectives. People personally want harmony and blessing in their family and neighborhood. People want a just and compassionate society. Reconciliation practically means building bridges that move people and our society out of hostility and into hospitality, out of exclusion and into inclusion. It also means social settings where respect, fairness, and consideration flourish. Because of these values we are still shocked when some citizens commit vicious crimes. Meanness, cruelty, and hate are heinous actions.

Some social analysis predicts an apocalyptic doom and gloom, a society crumbling in its infrastructures. This seems evident when work disappears, when people are redundant, superfluous, or disposable. Some political analysis decries the lack of concern for the common good and the breakdown of networks of meaning and civil participation. This seems evident when the mechanisms of society are stuck in bureaucratic red tape.

The problems do seem enormous, beyond our sight and our control anyway. Large issues in our country and our world cannot be attended to or solved by any one person. We begin to feel insignificant and powerless. The discourse that is necessary requires people talking and thinking, working and acting together in cooperation and collaboration. Andrew DelBanco writes, "(T)he ache for meaning goes unrelieved..Something..has snapped..the "bands" that once connected us to one another (The Real American Dream, A Meditation on Hope, p.107)."

Everyone acknowledges how important the individual person is for the health of the family or the state. A spirituality that incorporates reconciliation expands our concerns and horizons. It draws us to consider how important we really are for the health of the institutions and the processes of society.

In other words, institutions are significant as bearers of value. People who collaborate in these institutions can be ambassadors of hope. Churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, social clubs and associations, trade unions, museums, the UN, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, the World Bank, the World Court, the International Monetary Fund - all these institutions and their people help shape our society.

The processes of society are important because they enable shared responsibility and participation. They empower people and they kindle hope. Town meetings, open forums of free speech and mutual respect, civil and criminal courts, the press, and people serving on pastoral councils, church committees, and volunteering -through all these processes people are ambassadors of new life. Democratic processes get revitalized.

People collaborating together reform institutions and people cooperating together make the processes of society fresh and alive. Philip J. Chmielewski writes, "Here it is that..(Catholics), other Christians, other believers, and all other citizens (are brought) out of ghetto certainties toward a shared responsibility, respect for pluralism, and broad participation. Everybody's presence and everyone's voice counts. "In ecclesiastical terms, this means a heightened respect for the role of the laity; in political terms, democratic systems; in social terms, free development of persons and subsidiary institutions (New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, p. 678)."

Let us do what we can to rekindle hope in our institutions and the democratic processes of our society.