Forgiveness News

Christmas Tree Thief Gets Tree Plus Forgiveness

WCVB Channel 5, New Bedford, MA – After a 9-year battle with mitochondrial disease, 14-year-old Noah Fernandes died last spring. His grieving parents buried him at Pine Grove Cemetery in New Bedford.

Last week, they decided to spruce up his gravesite with a small Christmas tree, and decorated it with some of Noah’s favorite ornaments.

But over the weekend, someone stole Noah’s tree and all the ornaments.

Rather than express bitterness and resentment, however, Noah’s parents offered forgiveness and good wishes to the perpetrator. They said the Fernandes family lives by the creed: If you harbor bitterness, happiness will find another port.

“If someone needed it more than Noah, and they couldn’t afford a tree, then maybe Noah blessed it, and the tree will bring them happiness,” said Noah’s mother Christine.

Noah was diagnosed at age 5. He fought the disease for about nine years. Finally, confined to a wheelchair, blind and unable to speak, Noah succumbed to the disease in March, at age 14.

The family has set up a website in Noah’s memory. It tries to provide help for other families dealing with mitochondrial disease. They’re also using the website to raise money to build a playground for children in New Bedford. You can get more information at teamnoahfoundation.org.

Read more:

Mother forgives whoever stole Christmas tree from child’s grave – WCVB Channel 5, Boston, MA

New Bedford Mother Shows Grace After Christmas Tree Stolen From Son’s Grave – Boston.cbslocal.com

Christmas tree stolen from child’s grave, mother offers forgiveness – MSN.com (Microsoft)

Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon. . . . . . . . Can It Lead to Peace?

Lebanon native Ramy Taleb, his wife Roula, and a handful of like-minded individuals are confident they have the solution to the sectarian violence that is plaguing their homeland–peace through forgiveness education.

Roula and Ramy Taleb with their children JD and Deborah (in front of Ramy).education.

Although Ramy has been working with Dr. Robert Enright, founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, for several years, he has now broadened his focus by forming a government-registered NGO (non-governmental organization)–The Foundation for Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon (FFRL).

“FFRL believes in identifying all people through a common humanity, seeking to break down dehumanizing perceptions resulting from sectarian division and establishing a path towards social reconciliation through the lens of forgiveness,” according to Ramy, Director of the FFRL.

“We work with youth and young adults from various communities in Lebanon, providing education in nonviolent conflict resolution through our Forgiveness Journey curriculum,” he added. “This involves developing an understanding of the spectrum of forgiveness, from a space of basic coexistence all the way to complete reconciliation.”

During the past couple years, the group’s “projects have included people from Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi communities of various religious backgrounds,” according to FFRL’s website. “Intergroup engagement is core to our work, bringing opposed groups together in order to nurture the aspects of reconciliation they have learned from the Forgiveness Journey in a real world setting.”

Renewing Communities Through Forgiveness Education: A Prospect For Peace

Dr. Enright and his International Forgiveness Institute first pioneered this concept in 1985 and created the first scientifically proven forgiveness program in the US. Since 2002, Dr. Enright has focused almost exclusively on the development of forgiveness education curricula for children in war-torn, impoverished, and/or oppressed areas of the globe. The Foundation for Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon is one expression of this forgiveness education that now reaches to more than 30 countries around the world.

“Together with the IFI, we believe that forgiveness is a path to peace,” Ramy says. “With Dr. Enright’s help we are mentoring a generation of future peacemakers in the Middle-East.” 

Independence, Civil War and Turmoil

On Nov. 22, Lebanon celebrated 73 years of independence from France. Those years have been marked, however, with continued sectarian violence and conflicts including an Israeli invasion, Syrian occupancy, and a Lebanese Civil War.

In addition to all that, the recent and ongoing influx of Syrian refugees has only added to the nation’s instability, with an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees now seeking refuge in Lebanon. Furthermore, Palestinian refugees still make up another 450,000–this equates to a ratio of one in four being a refugee in Lebanon, the highest anywhere in the world.

Learn More:
1) Visit The Foundation for Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Lebanon website.
2) Watch a short 3:16 video about the FFRL.
3) Review the complete curriculum compendium for the Lebanese Forgiveness Education Program.
4) Donate to help FFRL mentor a generation of future Middle-East peacemakers in Lebanon.

Parents Forgive Attacker Who Severely Burned Their Daughter

The Christian Post, Indonesia – Parents of a 4-year-old girl who suffered severe burns in a Sunday terror attack on a church in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province, have forgiven the accused and have said they will not even ask God to punish him.

A bomb, reportedly a Molotov cocktail, was thrown inside the Gereja Oikumene Church compound where children were playing, killing a toddler and injuring three other infants.

Trinity Hutahaean, the 4-year-old girl, was severely wounded in the attack. The toddler’s aunt, Roina Simanjuntak, says the family has forgiven the accused.

“God teaches us to forgive and not to pay revenge,” Simanjuntak quoted the girl’s parents as saying. “I have a big hope that my family members, especially Trinity’s mother, can face this hard time. She is still in trauma after seeing what happened to her child.”

Despite tradition to the contrary, the mother did not pray to God to punish the accused, Simanjuntak added.

While the majority of the people in Indonesia are known to be tolerant and moderate, there are several extremist groups in the country. According to Human Rights Watch, more than 1,000 churches in the archipelago have been closed over the last decade due to pressure from such groups.

Read more:

The Christian Post, “Indonesia: Parents of 4-Y-O Burned in Church Bombing Say ‘God Teaches Us to Forgive’ “

The Jakarta Post, “Kalimantan church bomber linked to terrorist movement“

Forgiveness: why it’s important

Editor’s Note: Forgiveness has matured into a world-wide movement, including in India. This article is excerpted from a more lengthy news story in one of India’s largest business publications.

LiveMint.com, New Delhi, India – In his 2015 book, 8 Keys To Forgiveness, psychologist Robert Enright cites research to demonstrate the power of forgiveness. In a study conducted with fellow psychologist Suzanne Freedman, he found that incest survivors who underwent a 14-month programme to forgive their perpetrators were free of depression one year after the programme ended. The study was published in the Journal Of Consulting And Clinical Psychology in 1996.

In another study, published in the Psychology & Health journal in 2009, Enright and his colleagues worked with men who were admitted to the hospital with cardiac problems. After undergoing forgiveness therapy, which involved 10 weekly sessions of identifying and forgiving those who had wronged them, the men not only exhibited reduced levels of anger but also had healthier hearts.

Intriguingly, Enright has even found that students who were unable to concentrate in school owing to anger issues benefited from forgiveness counselling, so much so that they actually raised their grades from D to C, were able to focus better and had more amiable relationships with others. This study was published in the Journal Of Research In Education in 2008. Thus, forgiveness can have a positive ripple effect, wherein mercy extended to one person radiates to others.

If forgiveness, then, can have such a positive impact, how can we practise it more often? As Enright says, forgiveness goes beyond saying “I forgive you”. In fact, the words do not even have to be uttered; rather, they have to be felt. In its essence, forgiveness entails “extending goodness towards those who have hurt you”. It involves acknowledging the inherent worth of every human being. And, as we all know, this can be hard even at the best of times, and can become a Herculean task when we have been wronged grievously.

Enright, however, says that we can become “forgivingly-fit” with practice. By first forgiving people whom we love for minor misdemeanours, we can gradually graduate to forgiving those who have injured us in more heinous ways.

Finally, forgiveness should not be mistaken for weakness. As Mahatma Gandhi aptly put it, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

Aruna Sankaranarayanan, the author of this article, is the founder and director of Prayatna, a centre for children with learning difficulties in Andheri, a suburb of Mumbai, India. She completed her undergraduate studies at Mount Holyoke College and acquired her doctorate in developmental psychology at Harvard University. Both schools are in Massachusetts, USA.

Mint is one of India’s premium business news publications and the clear No.2 among business papers in terms of readership. LiveMint.com is Mint’s online portal and is among the fastest growing news websites in India.

To explore more of Dr. Enright’s compendium of peer-reviewed forgiveness research from the past 30+ years, visit the Research Section of this website.

Forgiveness Becomes Her Passion: “Replace Hate with Love”

Carly Elms is a determined woman, a well-educated and experienced therapist, and a disciple of “forgiveness therapy” as developed and proven by Dr. Robert Enright, the founder of the International Forgiveness Institute (IFI) and a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Forgiveness is the only way to move through the anger and pain of even the most horrible wrongs,” according to Elms, “and to not let hate consume the rest of a life.”

Carly R. Elms, M.Ed., LMSW, CRC

Elms holds two master’s degrees. Along with her Masters in Clinical Social Work (MSW), she has a Masters of Education in Educational & Counseling Psychology (M.Ed.). She is a certified rehabilitation counselor (CRC), with experience as a trauma therapist, counselor for the blind, transition counselor for youth with disabilities, a service-disabled veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and a fanatic about forgiveness therapy.

Last fall, Elms opened the Franciscan Forgiveness Center on the grounds of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Eucharist in Independence, MO, to help victims recover their lives from even the worst thing that could possibly happen to them.