Forgiving those who have hurt us

In the Gospel today, we have heard all about forgiveness, determination, finding and losing.  It’s also about the joy of finding.  I know what that is because I’m always losing things, but this was much more than that.  It was about finding peace and joy through forgiveness; it was about repentant sinners coming back to God.  I loved it.

Let me tell you about one repentant sinner who came back to God. This took place many years ago when I was a child, and it actually happened through someone in our parish.

I wasn’t allowed at that time to read lurid headlines in the press, so this is secondhand knowledge. My mother believed that our minds should not be clogged up by bad things when we were too young to understand them.  St. Paul would have loved my mother. Remember, he told the Phillippians to fill their minds with everything that was good?  Well, that was my mother too. So when this terrible thing happened to one of our neighbours, and a friend of ours, I wasn’t aware of it  at first, even though I went to the shop for the Sunday paper and it was all on the front page!!

It gradually became a topic of conversation with the women around the district, and of course I picked it up!  It was terrible.  The eldest daughter of the family was murdered violently in London, and the police were seeking the murderer.  She was the housekeeper for an exiled European king, and moved in exalted circles. 

But there was political unrest and a man apparently broke into their quarters in Knightsbridge or somewhere like that, and shot this young woman dead in the general melee. Why,  I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. We didn’t know her as she was much older and had left home many years before. But she was local, and we all knew the family.  They were lovely, and it was a terrible sorrow for them. The whole area was agog with the horror of it.

Eventually someone was charged with her murder, tried and condemned to death.  In those days they still had the death penalty for murder.  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that at least something had been done to find justice for Mary’s death. All that is, except one person – her mother.

 She was in her sixties,  I think. You aren’t good at ages when you’re young are you, but she must have been, because they had a large family; quite a few of them grown-up and independent of the family.  This woman who came from a small village in the North of Ireland, and had probably not moved out much from the big family house she had in Liverpool, decided she was going to visit her daughter’s murderer who was awaiting his execution in Pentonville prison. And that is what she did.

She had to fight her way through all the red tape to get there.  Eventually permission was granted, but of course she would have been closely guarded there in case she had come for her own version of justice!  But what she told this condemned man was that she and the family forgave him unreservedly for Mary’s death, that they did not hold it against him even though it was absolutely devastating for them, and that they would pray for him.. He wept and reputedly, so did she. 

 Before his death  I think he came back to God.  It took an elderly lady with no knowledge of London or the prison system of the time to bring that about.

She never got recognition for it, as far as I know, but she didn’t ask for it, or need it. 

She had God’s approval, and that is all that mattered.  When I saw those moving pictures of the late Pope with his would-be-murderer, I thought of that lady too. Aren’t we blessed with wonderful role models, in spite of all the bad things we hear.  Have a good week!