“Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.” —Desmond Tutu

On Wednesday, June 17, 2015, a gunman walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and shot nine people at a prayer meeting. He said he was there “to shoot black people.”

In a photo circulated of shooter Dylann Roof shortly after his arrest, he stares unsmiling at the camera. His jacket bears flags of apartheid-era South Africa and nearby Rhodesia. Apartheid was a devastating South African racial segregation policy that lasted from 1948 to 1994. Roof created a website earlier this year called “The Last Rhodesian,” a reference to the white-ruled African country, which fought a bitter civil war against black majority rule before it became Zimbabwe. Prior to the attack, Roof told friends and acquaintances about his desire to kill, but no one reported the threat.

Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Myra Thompson, and a handful of others welcomed this man into their Bible study. When I learned that Roof spent nearly an hour seated in that Bible study before he shot the people he met there, I couldn’t help but think of an eerie parallel reported by Mark Juergensmeyer in Terror in the Mind of God:

There is a possibility that in some cases … terrorists have frightened themselves. In some instances the magnitude of their destructive acts has been so enormous that they were shaken into a realistic understanding of what their symbolic violence can in fact produce. … Kerry Noble reported that when he was sent to destroy a gay church and its parishioners in Kansas City, the moments in which he sat in the pew before he was to trigger his bomb and depart was an occasion for him to seriously reflect on what his intended act would achieve: “All I could envision was torn bodies, limbed ripped from torsos,” Noble recalled. Sobered and shaken, he left the sanctuary with the briefcase containing the bomb still in his hand. (238)

The similarities are unsettling. Both Roof and Noble stayed for a while in the church, with the intent to kill, but one gave up his violent intent and the other did not. Noble said later that he looked around the room and found that the people there were no different than anyone else he knew. He related with them. He couldn’t bring himself to hurt them.

Roof didn’t relate. On his website he reportedly described black people as “stupid and violent.” Whatever else can be known, even in the moments before Roof acted, he looked into the eyes of the people in that room and accused them of cruelty. This is not one of those situations where compassion for the killer comes easily or appropriately. The idea of forgiving our enemies is a bitter, bitter thought. In the words of NAACP president Cornell William Brooks, “There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture.” Nevertheless, soon after the attack a number of the families forgave him.

Where Roof failed to hear the call of humanity in that church, maybe we can take heart in the fact that Noble did. The work of reconciliation is always present, always tangible, even in a moment you might think it is too late. The families of the Charleston nine in their powerful act of forgiveness remind us further that the work of reconciliation is needed even after the worst has happened. Forgiveness is not a superficial, one-time act. Forgiveness is the opening of a door. What’s on the other side is unknown—could be bad, could be good, but you have to open the door to make that process possible.

Chris Singleton, Son of Victim Sharonda Singleton, Extends Forgiveness to Charleston Killer

Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his contribution to opposing apartheid. Among other things, he led the Truth and Reconciliation Councils that helped transition South Africa out of apartheid without sparking a cycle of violent retribution. Tutu’s ubuntutheology is about interdependence. In Zulu culture, “it is not the physical properties of your eyes that I fix on, as, say, an eye-specialist would. … What I pick up is the gaze, and in the gaze the presence of a person actively present to me. And the same is simultaneously true of you.” Peace activist Leymah Gbowee described it more succinctly as “I am what I am because of who we all are.”

Buoyed by this everyday awareness of the other, ubuntu becomes an alternative to revenge.

Tutu lived in a place where racialized killings were (and are) commonplace. My first thought ten years ago when I read his theology was, “I have no idea what that’s like.” I know it better these days, not because it is now more common in the United States but because I now belong to communities who call it out when it happens. I appreciate much better now than I did ten years ago how truly heroic Tutu’s conciliatory approach was and is. On the same day perhaps that black people were killed in cold blood in a South African church or on a South African street, consider: Desmond Tutu found the inner reserves to speak this, and we can, too:

We will grow in the knowledge that they [white people] too are God’s children, even though they may be our enemies. They belong together with us in the family of God, and their humanity is caught up in our humanity, as ours is caught up in theirs.

Tutu is clear that the white people who humiliated, abused, and killed black people were his enemies. I think there’s an emotion underneath the word enemiesthat we shouldn’t ignore. Tutu grieved as we do the deaths of innocent people who have names, families, and roles in the world. Tutu’s empathy stretched beautifully toward the innocent, not as an afterthought but as the white-hot truth that drives us to humanize the enemy:

Poor, hungry people … are God’s stand-ins, created in his image. They are precious, they have their names engraved on God’s palms, the hairs on their heads are numbered, and God knows them, these nonentities, these anonymous ones who are killed and nobody seems to care.

Earlier this week I published an article on reconciliation. I wrote it long before Charleston happened, but it is more appropriate than I could have known at the time. “We humans feel deeply. We nurse our wounds. We get scared,” I wrote. “We must come to terms with this in ourselves, too—little acts of personal reconciliation that lead up to the big ones with others.” I urged us there to see one-on-one relationship-building as a journey toward public acts of reconciliation. Today I’ll conclude with three concrete ways we can all start the work of reconciliation today:

1. Notice the little acts of violence you are capable of in everyday life. Practice choosing the bigger, kinder path. There is no end to this path.
2. Take it seriously when other people express the desire to be violent. Empathize with whatever you can empathize with in their statement, but push back. There’s an energy to violence that is alluring. Insist on other, more promising ways to exert that energy. You are more powerful than you think.
3. Familiarize yourselves with the many ways people experience difference. Practice healthy, helpful responses. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. Here’s a short read (PDF) that should get you started.

Emanuel AME has taken this seriously, and I think we should, too. They opened their doors the Sunday following the shooting to welcome an overflowing crowd of members and supporters.

“I want you to know, because the doors of Mother Emanuel” are open, the Rev. Norvel Goff Sr., a presiding elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, said in a rousing sermon there on Sunday, “it sends a message to every demon in hell and on earth.”

Originally Published by Westar Institute Here