In the prayer of Saint Francis he says, ‘it is by forgiving that we are forgiven’, and this means I suppose that there is a direct connection between the clemency we express and the world that we experience. That old school staple, the Lord’s Prayer, says, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. Freedom has a clause: it is forgiveness. Or as Gandhi would have it, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’. If we want forgiveness, we must forgive.
