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| Joseph Fadelle |
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| Louis Zamperini |
(Third Sunday of the Year (B): This homily was given on
January 25, 2015 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Third Sunday 2015]
Forgiveness is hard.
Anyone who tells you otherwise has obviously never been
deeply hurt--and I don't know too many people in that category. Most people have been deeply hurt many times in their lives.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie,
“Unbroken.” It’s about the late Louis
Zamperini, who was a distance runner on the United States Olympic team of 1936. But that’s not the aspect of his life that
the film focuses on. Zamperini also served
in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Second World War as a bombardier. Well on May 27, 1943, his plane crashed into
the Pacific Ocean, where he spent the next 47 days on a life raft desperately trying
to stay alive. He was finally rescued. Unfortunately it was by the Japanese, who
promptly sent him to a prison camp until the end of the war in 1945. There he was beaten and tortured mercilessly,
especially by one particular guard, nicknamed “the Bird,” who eventually made
it onto General Douglas MacArthur’s list of the 40 most wanted war criminals in
Japan.
The film focuses on Zamperini’s experience on the ocean for
47 days, and then in the prison camp—and it ends with him being freed and
coming home at the end of the war.
It’s a good movie—as far as it goes. But it
definitely doesn’t go far enough. Just
before the credits roll at the end of the film a brief epilogue is posted, and
in that epilogue it says that Louis Zamperini forgave those who had treated him so horribly during the war, and
that he followed through on the promise he made to God when he was floating on
that raft in the Pacific: “If you will save me, I will serve you forever.”
But the viewer is left wondering: How exactly did he do
that? Not only, ‘How did he serve God?’
but also, ‘How did he deal with his anger and with the other negative emotions
he must have experienced after all those months in captivity?’ These people treated him like an animal! It couldn’t have been easy for Louis to
forgive them. It had to be an incredible
struggle.
The film unfortunately doesn’t address any of that—and
that’s sad.
A much clearer picture of the struggle to forgive comes
through in a book I mentioned in a homily I gave a couple of weeks ago—“The
Price to Pay”—which tells the inspiring story of Joseph Fadelle, a man who
converted from Islam to Catholicism in Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein.
During the Saddam years it was against the law in Iraq for a
Muslim to become a Christian. In fact,
it was not only against the law; it was also a crime punishable by death! And so Joseph was forced to give up his
inheritance (which was pretty extensive), as well as his family and his homeland
in order to become a Catholic.
Oh yes, and did I mention that his brothers and uncle shot
him and had him beaten and tortured when they found out that he intended to
convert?
Eventually Joseph, along with his wife and two children,
escaped from Iraq and found their way into Jordan. From there they went to France, where they
now live.
Which is where the book ends—but not before Joseph makes a very honest admission. He admits that at the time he wrote the book he
still had a lot of work to do in the area of forgiveness.
Listen to what he said:
“It will take time, a
lot of time, for me to forgive my family for all that they made me suffer:
prison, torture, lack of money. … my family is indeed the cause of all my
troubles. And that is the hardest thing
for me to accept.
"I fight every day,
though, against that bitterness, knowing very well that it is not
Christian. Of all the battles that I
have fought until now, this will certainly be the most difficult. I have asked friends and priests whom I have
met to pray for me, that I may truly find the will to forgive.”
One biblical figure who would find it extremely easy to
understand the plights of Joseph Fedelle and Louis Zamperini is the man we
heard about in today’s first reading: the prophet Jonah. In that reading we have a very brief excerpt
from his story. Your assignment for the
week, by the way, is to open your Bible sometime during the next 7 days and
read the rest of the story, the rest
of the Book of Jonah. Read it from
beginning to end.
“But, Fr. Ray, I don’t have time to do that.”
Oh yes, you do! The
Book of Jonah is one of the shortest books in the entire Bible! It’s less than 3 pages long in most versions
of Sacred Scripture—and that includes the introduction!
So don’t tell me you don’t have time.
The verses we heard this morning occur in the middle of the
book. Here the Lord commands Jonah to go
to the city Nineveh and preach a message of repentance. And Jonah goes—which he did NOT do at the beginning of the book when God called him
the first time! In fact, after the
initial call he received, Jonah got on the very first ship that he could find
that was headed in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION, away from Nineveh!
Why, you ask?
Because Jonah hated
the Ninevites, that’s why!
Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, which, at the time, was
Israel’s arch-enemy. Jonah knew the Lord
was not only just; he knew the Lord was also forgiving and merciful. And he had a sneaking suspicion that if he
went to the Ninevites and told them to repent—and they actually did repent—then God would not allow
their city to be destroyed.
But Jonah wanted the
place destroyed! He wanted to see
the city of Nineveh go up in flames! He
wanted to see it “fry” like Sodom and Gomorrah had many years earlier!
So he ran away (actually, he sailed away—on a ship that was
headed west toward Tarshish).
God said, “Not so fast, Jonah!” and he threw the ship into a
terrible storm. Jonah was tossed
overboard in the middle of it and swallowed by a gigantic fish (which is
sometimes referred to as a whale).
After spending 3 days and 3 nights inside this whale’s belly,
God commanded the creature to spew Jonah up onto the shore—which is where
today’s first reading picks up the story.
The Lord said, “Ok Jonah, let’s try this one more time. Go to the people of Nineveh and tell them
that unless they repent within 40 days their entire city will be destroyed.”
Now, to his credit, Jonah did learn his lesson. He learned that it was probably not a good
idea to defy God a second time! So, as
we heard a few moments ago, he went to Nineveh—albeit begrudgingly—and he
delivered the message the Lord told him to deliver.
And, almost immediately, the whole place repented—which, of
course, was precisely what Jonah did NOT want to happen!
At that point, Jonah had a choice to make: forgive and find
peace, or persist in unforgiveness and be miserable. He, unfortunately, chose the latter.
He whined; he pouted; he sulked; he told God that he had a
“right” to be angry (I’m not sure where that right came from, but Jonah
insisted that he had it).
It got so bad that he eventually prayed for death! He said, “I can’t deal with this anymore,
Lord, so please take my life.”
That’s what unforgiveness can do to a person.
Hopefully Jonah eventually had a change of heart and made
the effort to forgive—as difficult as that would have been for him to do.
Yes, forgiveness—real
forgiveness—is hard.
It’s hard, BUT IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE!—as people like Louis
Zamperini have demonstrated to the world.
If you need some help in this regard, you might want to
check out the “Forgiveness Steps” insert that I’ve put in the bulletin this
week.
Some of you have seen these before.
These are 5 simple steps you can use when you pray (or at
any other time) that can help you let go of anger and bitterness and all those
negative emotions and attitudes that can destroy us from the inside out.
Use those steps. I do
all the time. They are very helpful.
I’ll close my homily with something Louis Zamperini wrote in
one of his books. It seems fitting that
I should give him the last word today. He
said, “I think the hardest thing in life is to forgive. Hate is self-destructive. If you hate somebody, you're not hurting the
person you hate, you're hurting yourself.
It's a healing, actually, it's a real healing … forgiveness.”
Very, very wise words—spoken by a man who definitely knew
what he was talking about.
And if you don’t believe me, go and see that movie, “Unbroken.”
