After murders, families find a healing path
Mar 04, 2010
from the article by Emily Dougherty in Mennonite Weekly Review:
Note: Forgiveness is a controversial and difficult topic for many victims of crime. Nevertheless, there are victims who are able to forgive those who have harmed them severely. They do this for many reasons -- there may be as many reasons as there are victims who forgive.
After restorative encounters, some victims find that they wish to forgive the offender. This is not the goal of restorative justice, however. The value of restorative encounters for victims is to achieve some measure of healing; in some instances that includes forgiveness. The following article is the story of survivors of two brutal murders who have chosen to forgive.
Four sisters — Ruth, Frieda, Bess and Suzy — have lived 40 years without their mother. Helen Klassen, a Sunday school teacher, was murdered March 14, 1969.
Bill Pelke’s grandmother, Ruth Pelke, was killed by four teenage girls in Gary who robbed her house May 14, 1985.
These acts of violence devastated two families and, for the Klassen sisters, infected the years of their youth. Their path to adulthood was fraught with struggles of how to heal and when to forgive.
On March 15 at College Mennonite Church, Pelke and three of the Klassen sisters spoke about their evolution from fear and anger to healing and forgiveness. Their stories have been told around the world through Journey of Hope, an organization co-founded by Pelke and led by murder victims’ family members, such as the Klassens, who oppose the death penalty.
....Their distance became physical as the sisters married and moved to different locations around the United States and world.
Yet, eventually, each woman began to let out the darkness that had enveloped their lives. In the journey from violence to healing, one of those steps is telling your story and not having secrets.
“We are only as sick as our darkest secret,” Klassen-Landis said, “and we had despair and fear and grief tucked away in every nook and cranny.”
Klassen-Landis and Klassen only began to share their story when their sister Ruth Andrews, who became involved with Journey of Hope in 1993, encouraged them to join.
Their ability to reconcile anger and pain became stronger the more they had to tell their story. They discovered ties between their experience and those of other murder victim family members whose relationships became restorative.
“The beauty of love is the healing that happens through it,” Klassen-Landis said. “Forgiveness is a way of life that sets us all free.”
....[Pelke] grandmother, Ruth Pelke, was 78 when she invited four teenage
girls into her home, under the impression they wanted her to teach them a
Bible lesson.
Pelke’s father found Ruth’s body the next day.
Paula Cooper was 15 when she stabbed Ruth Pelke 33 times, and a year later became the youngest female on death row in America.
At first Pelke supported Cooper’s sentence. But he struggled with whether Cooper should die.
Pelke began questioning God. Three things he meditated on changed his perspective. The first was Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Second, Pelke remembered Matthew 18 when Peter asked Jesus how often to forgive a sin, seven times? Jesus replied by saying 70 times seven. Last, he envisioned Jesus’ words at the crucifixion: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
At that point, he remembered Cooper’s grandfather yelling at the sentencing, “You’re going to kill my baby!” He saw the tears on her prison uniform and knew that if he didn’t try to forgive, he would feel guilty whenever he thought about his grandmother.
After forgiving Cooper, Pelke went on a mission to have her life spared. Through his work, she was taken off of death row and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
“Revenge is not the answer. It’s never the answer,” Pelke said. “The answer is love and compassion for all of humanity.”
victims & forgiveness
Often the public hears stories of forgiveness like those told in this article and question how this kind of forgiveness is possible. My answer to that is that I don't know. It does seem to be beyond something that is humanly possible. Maybe that is why it was once said "to err is human to forgive divine."
(Alexander Pope)
There is something we must do when we hear stories like these. We need to listen.