Police Officer Steven McDonald was on a routine patrol with another officer in New York City’s Central Park. There had been bicycle thefts in the area, so they were alert but not expecting any immediate problems. As they approached a group of teenage boys, the youths fled. Officer McDonald ran after three of the boys, and his partner ran after the others.
When Officer McDonald caught up to the three he had run after, he identified himself as a plainclothes police officer and said he’d like to ask some questions. As he was asking their names and where they lived, he noticed a suspicious bulge at the hem of the pant leg of one of the boys. Thinking it might be a gun tucked into the boy’s sock, he moved to examine it.
In an instant, another boy stood over him, and as Officer McDonald began to straighten up, he was shot three times. When other officers arrived minutes later, they rushed him to the nearest hospital, where emergency personnel immediately began working on him. They managed to save his life, but he was left in a very different state than when he walked into the park.
The first bullet had struck him just above his right eye. The second bullet struck his throat, leaving him with a severe speech impediment. The third shattered his spine and left him paralyzed from the neck down. He would spend the rest of his life on a ventilator. His wife of eight months, who was three months pregnant, collapsed when she was told of her husband’s condition.
Steven McDonald spent the next eighteen months in hospitals before being released. During that time, his son was born. He said his son’s birth was like a message from God that he had to respond to. Upon learning that a boy named Shavod Jones was the one who shot him, Steven prayed that Shavod would redeem himself. Steven wanted to let go of his anger and bitterness; he wanted to love his wife and son.
He wrote a letter to the imprisoned Shavod. It took a few more letters before Shavod wrote back. Then, one night, Shavod called the McDonald household. He apologized to Steven, his wife, and his son. The apology was accepted, and Steven told Shavod how he wished the two of them could someday talk to others about how a single act of violence had so changed both their lives.
By the time Shavod was released from prison, the exchange of letters had ceased. When asked later if writing to the teen who had shot him was a mistake, Steven replied that it was not. He understood that to Shavod, a police officer was a symbol of a pervasive system of oppression, a symbol of all the social and economic injustices he was living through. Steven was the enemy, a dangerous one to be defended against.
As he later explained, Steven was able to forgive because “I believe the only thing worse than receiving a bullet in my spine would have been to nurture revenge in my heart.”1
When something terrible happens, it’s natural for us to ask, “Why?” Steven felt he knew why—as a police officer, he had been perceived by the teenagers as a symbol of social injustice to be feared and hated, never to be respected, certainly not trusted. He represented all the disappointments, the opportunities denied out of hand, and the complete negation of worth that they had already experienced in their short lives. At that moment, in the face of an us-versus-them situation and feeling threatened, Shavod fired the gun. Understanding all this, over time and with effort, Steven was able to forgive the fifteen-year-old boy who had condemned him to live the rest of his life in a wheelchair, dependent on a ventilator, and struggling to speak.
This account of forgiveness, and others like it, are invariably newsworthy because they are so moving, and noteworthy. Not getting angry seems to be a challenge for too many of us. How many smartphone videos have we seen online and on social media of people becoming violent because a worker was deemed inattentive, a line wasn’t moving fast enough, or someone was asked to follow the rules.
No wonder the idea of forgiving someone whose actions have irreparably changed our life feels unimaginable. Thankfully, we have examples of those who managed to do so to show us that such a profound degree of forgiveness is possible.
Previously, in “It Was a Mistake,” we learned how Debbie Baigrie endured over forty agonizing surgeries over the course of more than ten years to rebuild her partially destroyed jaw. And yet she let go of hatred and forgave her thirteen-year-old shooter because, as she said, he was just a kid. She understood that children and teenagers make mistakes, sometimes even horrific ones. But they need to be allowed—and encouraged—to learn from those mistakes. This was not just true for her own children or other children who looked like her. It was just as true for Ian. Not allowing someone to learn from their mistakes is to deny them their chance of redemption and reformation.
In “Another Form of Justice,” we learned how Abdi had been terrorized by a woman who was trying to run him down. But having undergone years of suffering fleeing a war zone and living in a refugee camp when he was young, Abdi recognized that she too had suffered from trauma as a child. She didn’t need more suffering, she needed help. Not wanting to be a part of her suffering more, he let go of hatred and forgave her, and even pleaded with the judge for leniency at her sentencing.
And then there is Steven. After being shot, he would spend the remaining thirty years of his life a quadriplegic. But like Debbie and Abdi, Steven also chose, as was said of him, to drop the luggage of hatred and let go. He chose love for his wife and son. He chose to forgive.
If someone tried to kill us, would we be able to forgive that person? If someone traumatizes us, would we be able to forgive? Unlikely. We’re probably still having difficulty forgiving someone who inconveniences or embarrasses us. And so, we keep replaying and fussing over how some weeks ago, a coworker got the promotion we thought would be ours or how annoying that friend who borrows things but never returns them is.
Why can’t we drop our own luggage of hate?
Why can’t we let go? And what things can’t we let go of?
Our thoughts. Our attachments.
As desires increase, we can become so wrapped up in satisfying them that we are blind to everything else, even when others are crying out for help. Focused on self-interest, we feel justified in pursuing what we believe should be ours. We may feel entitled to what we pursue because of our current situation or perhaps our imagined self-importance. Whatever the reason, our attachments and cravings increase.
And so do our enmities, as our frustration at not attaining what we want has us casting personal restraint aside. Thwarted in our craving, we find ourselves in a position where someone says something that irritates us. We fume silently. The next time we meet, we find ourselves in a situation in which we feel compelled to voice our anger at the other. Later, the other person begins to yell at us. And before you know it, we’re both acting out of our rage, the smartphones are recording, and we’re famous for all the wrong reasons.
We need instead to let go of our attachments to our self-interest, to everything we cling to, be they desires or aversions. We must also let go of our bitterness and desire for retribution, our desire that those who have harmed us suffer as we have suffered.
Steven realized that he had to let go of revenge. If he allowed it to fester, he said that he would have inflicted an injury on his very soul, hurting his wife and newborn son. He could do nothing about being paralyzed from the neck down. But he could prevent adding spiritual injuries to the physical ones. And so he began working on forgiveness. As he said, “Forgiving is not just a one-time decision. You’ve got to live forgiveness, every day.”2
He worked on dropping the luggage of hate by understanding the suffocating conditions that can lead a teenage boy to see a stranger not as another human being but as an enemy to be shot and killed. And by understanding how the pain of any hatred on his part would be inflicted on the innocent people he loved: his wife and his newborn son. Hatred, resentment, and revenge are weapons we aim at others, but which invariably backfire and destroy us and all those close to us. Steven understood how a lack of forgiveness on his part would hurt others, from those he loved to his assailant.
But he did not stop at forgiveness.
One of the steps in recovering from grief, from loss, is to turn the pain from our loss into something positive. A much-sought speaker himself, Steven founded Breaking the Cycle, an organization that provides at no cost, speakers who talk at school assemblies on the importance of overcoming conflict through respect and forgiveness.
Like overstuffed detritus-crammed luggage, hatred weighs us down, leaving us so overwhelmed and exhausted that every moment of every day is a struggle. We can forget about moving forward. We’re stuck, self-condemned prisoners.
Those who let go and forgive will free themselves of the weight of hatred bearing down on them and be able to move on. They will have learned that the first arrow of pain can be let go and allowed to fall at their feet. And that the following self-inflicted arrows of hate and suffering need never be shot.
1. Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive: Not A Step But A Journey, Orbis Books, Maryknoll N.Y., 2005. ebook, Chapter 14: Not a Step but a Journey.