Forgiveness Summit To Ring In 2000

Her husband tried diplomacy to bring peace to a troubled world. Susan Baker wants to try forgiveness.

As secretary of state for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, James Baker was considered a tough, capable negotiator. While he was shuttling across the ocean to jawbone with feuding government leaders, she was starting a national organization to help the homeless in Washington, D.C.

Now she’s supporting efforts to stage a global summit on forgiveness in Jerusalem. The setting is significant since the holy city often seems to be the enmity capital of the world. And the date will be symbolic as well - the last two days of 1999 and the first two days of 2000.

“If anyone had suggested after we left Washington that I should take on anything else having to do with fund raising for a nonprofit, I would have said, ‘Please lock me in the closet and throw away the key!”’ Susan Baker said with a gently self-mocking laugh on a recent visit to Dallas.

After all, she was looking forward to resuming life in Houston and continuing her work for the homeless. She was hoping for more time with her family - eight “his and hers” children, plus 12 grandchildren and one on the way. She missed her Tuesday Bible study group and having time to “dig in the dirt” in her garden jeans.

But then, she was introduced to the work of Mac Harnden, a Christian psychologist in Kansas City, Mo. Both shared an interest in finding strategies for helping people deal with forgiveness. He came up with the idea for the “Congress on Forgiveness” in Jerusalem.

“We have the convention center reserved and hotel rooms and we’re praying everything else will come together,” Susan Baker explained. “The main speeches will not be by people you’ve heard of, but who have lived remarkable lives of forgiveness. They won’t be known at large, but they will be people who have suffered greatly and chosen forgiveness instead of revenge or bitterness.”

The program is still taking shape, but she expects a certain former secretary of state to be on hand to help with the introductions. And that multicultural groups - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists - will explore topics of forgiveness together. “Hopefully cross-cultural bridges will be built and greater understanding can come from this. At the least, we can lift up the idea that we should love and respect our neighbors in spite of differences in faith, race or governance.”

She has had difficulty with forgiveness herself, she admitted. In fact, she made her own struggles with forgiveness the heart of her remarks to the Thanks-Giving Square Foundation last week. She revealed that the hardest thing for her about living in the “fishbowl” of politics was learning to cope with negative media coverage.

The worst, she said, came when one of their sons was arrested on a marijuana charge. “Of course, he broke the law, and, of course, he was wrong,” she said. But the event made every major TV news program, every big newspaper and every news magazine. Had he not been the son of the White House chief of staff, she said, it would have been a painful, but private family problem.

“The unfairness of this undid me, and I went ballistic,” she recalled. “Families give up a great deal in public life, and it is particularly hard on kids. For several days, I stomped around and was so angry I couldn’t do anything. When I finally wore myself out and stopped ranting and raving, I asked the Lord to help me deal with the anger I was feeling.”

It didn’t happen overnight, but her anger did disappear as she began praying for the media. She still prays “that men and women would be sensitive to families, that there would be more people in journalism who were less cynical.” And she prays for the Clintons and other families in public life.

“Forgiveness is not a feeling, but an act of the will,” she told the Thanks-Giving Foundation dinner. “I KNOW this is true, because it has happened to me time and time again.”

The audience responded with great warmth and a little surprise - surprise because it is unusual to find a public figure who speaks so candidly about matters of faith that intersect with politics and the human experience. To Susan Baker’s credit, she does so in a straightforward way that earns respect from even those of differing faiths.

Perhaps that’s because of her quiet dignity. And because audiences know that what she says about forgiveness is TRUE. As Nelson Mandela has shown so magnanimously, forgiveness is counterculture. But it works.

Forgiveness is not something you hear about much in today’s self-conscious world. But it is still the best way to stop the cycle of repaying a hurt with a hurt, whether in the world arena, a marriage, the office, or the highway. Besides, as the wit Oscar Wilde once advised, “Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”

xxxx