I grew up in a religion in which confession was a weekly ritual. As I child, I remember standing in line outside the confessional waiting anxiously for my turn to go into a dark private room and begin with the words, “bless me father, for I have sinned.” Then I would recite my litany of sins, both venial (minor-league stuff) and mortal (big time, major-league material that could land you in Hell for all eternity).

For an eight-year-old, mortal sins were deliciously angst-ridden. I remember agonizing over these epic sins that went beyond the vague, clumsy and occasional “impure thoughts” into the realm of a touch or two, or those times when I would just linger in the corridors of fantasy (I was the youngest of four boys and the inevitable “girly” magazines would end up under somebody’s mattress).

At that age, I knew I would never be a Judas. Salome and Delilah were beyond my ken. And Adam and Eve seemed like such nice kids just having a bad day in the park (I’m still unable to mythologize them into bad parents and, anyway, could eating of the tree of knowledge really be that bad of thing?)

As that eight-year-old, however, I learned to quantify my sins. Before I went into the confessional box, I would literally count in my head the number of times I had committed a particular sin and tally up the score card of moral indiscretions, counting even the “occasions of sin” (those sinful settings that could easily jump start the nihilistic plunge into abandoning the God I believed in at the time).

The numbers game, of course, gave me a kind of validation cushion, some concrete proof that I was indeed a sinner. And numbers, of course, could be erased because they had flesh, they could be counted, they could be added to or subtracted from. They had a definite existence that could be easily obliterated by a priest. And when the numbers were erased on Saturday afternoon or evening, I had a clean slate on Sunday that heralded in the new day of my short-lived sanctity.

On the other hand, I would be back the next week armed with the fatalistic knowledge that I would again get into some kind of trouble during the week. The samsara wheel of my faults would always gain inevitable momentum no matter how relieved I would be after a good-old-fashioned confession.

Forgiveness, in this small coliseum of sin and guilt, always came from a clerical expert, a man who would grant his forgiveness with a quick blessing from his right hand that would reach vertically up to the ceiling, slide down about two feet, and then move horizontally across space in the form of a cross. It was very cathartic and always brought relief until I would find myself standing again in the confessional line the next Saturday afternoon.

Forgiveness. What’s in a word?

Well, I have forgiven many in my life and many have forgiven me. Sometimes, though, I believe that the damage we do ourselves and others can be irreparable and the best we can do is to offer some compassion-driven amends without any expectations. We can only hope that the other will eventually open to our painful “I’m sorries.” If not, well, we’ve taken care of our side of the street.

As I look out at the wider world and think about forgiveness, I am constantly confused. Forgiveness seems to work on a micro, eight-year-old level or in any of a number of recovery forums. But in our local, federal, and state courts or in the many global-conflict worlds out there, when adults start to hurt each other, all cultures seem to struggle to find their innocence in knowing how to respond to perpetrators, predators, terrorists, serial killers, suicide bombers, child molesters, and crimes against humanity. “Off with their heads” seems to be the immediate response.

Those of us who choose to pay attention to history continue to be haunted by pictures of black lynchings in America, Japanese families interred in America camps during World War II, bloated bodies of Tutsis floating in a Rwandan river, mangled, paper-thin bodies of Jews being dumped into mass graves like rag dolls, fire-and-blood-scorched victims of suicide bombings in Baghdad and Pakistan, Iraqi parents draped in grief over the bodies of their dead children, or the streams of 9/11 victims jumping from one of the World-Trade-Center towers like light snow-flakes on dark country road. As the Quebecers would say, Je me souviens (I remember).

And, quite frankly, I do not want ever to forget, for these are images that seep into my soul like a clean-edged dagger, the kind of sharp instrument sliding into my body I often have nightmares about when my psyche is troubled. They are images that wash over me and teach me how to grieve, to feel into the world of someone else’s pain, and to internalize the epic nature of that gut-wrenching fear that there are some humans for whom remorse is an arctic-cold unknown.

So how do I forgive a terrorist? How do I learn to calm my rage at the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing? How do I pull back and disengage from everything that tells me that the guilty must be punished for their crimes?

Can I ever be an Eva Kor who forgave the Nazi doctor, Mangele, for all of the perverted tests he did on twins at Auschwitz? Will I ever be able to reach the moral stature of a Mandela who left his 27 year prison life with no thought of revenge? Will I ever be able to write myself into serenity after trying to describe Jeffrey Dahmer’s hacking away the limbs of young black teenagers and then putting them in a freezer?

Such acts of controlled indifference reach into a pit of Hell that I never thought could be any more bottomless. And then I remember Ted Bundy and Goebels. There are, I suspect, even deeper bottomless pits humanity is capable of sinking into.

On my most avenging days, I become a supernatural creature from the Bhagavad-Gita telling its central protagonist that killing a relative for a just cause is not evil, for the material world is mere illusion. When your brother dies in your arms after you’ve ripped his heart out and cut off both his legs, he is just a phantom, a figment of somebody’s wandering imagination. Not to worry, for the universe does not recognize his flesh as real. He is nothing more than maya, maya, maya, in spite of having changed your diapers when you were only a month old or kissed you on your wet, drooling lips when he lifted you from your cradle.

On my most forgiving days, I try to think of Stalin’s parents, that Hitler might have drawn a picture of a horse when he was a child, that Mao might have wept at the death of a close friend.

But then I am back in a New York City jury room deciding the fate of the alleged mastermind of 9/11 or in a military courtroom judging someone who ripped 12 people out of their families’ lives. Will I follow the judicial process to look for culpability or will I try to dig deep into the pockets of my humanity to find some ounce of forgiveness?

I really don’t know.

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