“If anything I have said or done has offended you, . .

Letting Go: Dropping the Luggage of Hate

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.

What about most of us?

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.

From Rage to Forgiveness (Part 7)

Friendship: It Was a Mistake

On a July evening in 1990, for the first time since the birth of her second child, Debbie Baigrie went out with some friends. Accompanied by a male friend, she was returning to her car. As the two were talking, Ian Manuel, a young black teenager egged on by some older teens, came up behind them and demanded some money. 

Debbie turned to find a gun in her face. She screamed. Ian fired. 

One of the bullets entered her mouth, ricocheted off a tooth, and exited through her cheek. Terrified, Debbie fled as fast as she could, with blood flowing from her face. Ian shot the gun a few more times at Debbie as she ran off and also at the man who was with her. Ian then dropped the gun in some bushes, turned, and ran. 

A few days later, Ian was arrested in an unrelated case. While talking to the police, he volunteered that he was the one who had shot the white woman downtown a few nights earlier. Ian was thirteen years old. Despite his age, he was tried as an adult. He was found guilty and sentenced to three life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole. At the age of fourteen, Ian would become the youngest inmate in the prison. 

As his second Christmas in prison approached, having come across Debbie’s contact information in his file, Ian impulsively made a collect call to her. She debated whether to accept the charges for the call. The damage to her jaw was extensive. Her dentist had cried when he saw it. Debbie had lost five teeth and much of her jaw. She would undergo more than ten years of over forty painful surgeries. But at that moment, she decided to accept Ian’s call. Ian wished her and her family a Merry Christmas. He then apologized for shooting her. 

As Ian related later in his book, titled My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption, Debbie asked why Ian had shot her. 

He hesitantly replied that it had all been a mistake. Just before he needed to hang up, he asked if it would be okay if he contacted her again. She said yes.

Debbie later explained that she was in such pain and couldn't eat. She was angry. But after going back and forth with herself, she began to feel sympathetic. Ian was just a kid and kids do stupid stuff. In the end, she found it wasn’t difficult to forgive him.

The two began a periodic correspondence in which Debbie encouraged Ian to get his GED High School equivalency degree and reminded him about the importance of being well-read and staying positive. And that he needed to keep learning and improving himself.

As Ian studied for his GED, he told Debbie about his test results, which were very good. He explained that she became a mother to him and helped him grow up. In 2010, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against life without the possibility of parole for juveniles charged with anything less than murder, Ian's attorney appealed his sentence. At his resentencing hearing on November 10, 2016, Debbie was there, just three rows behind him. Ian was released from prison that very night. He was forty years old and had spent twenty-six years in prison, eighteen of them consecutively in solitary confinement. 

When he left prison and as he was trying to build a life he was so unprepared for, Debbie was there. She affirmed that Ian had become like an adopted son. After his release, Ian began working with the Equal Justice Initiative, the legal rights group that took up his case in 2006 in hopes of overturning his sentence. He also started writing his memoir, which includes some of his poetry and was published in 2022.  

All his life, Ian had been told by society and the justice system that he would never amount to anything. That he would die alone in solitary, and no one would know. Debbie had other ideas. She saw the potential that others had not and knew that a thirteen-year-old boy could make mistakes, life-changing mistakes, but those mistakes and a troubled childhood did not mean he was beyond redemption. 

But Debbie did not only forgive, she offered encouragement and guidance. And friendship. 

Sometimes when we forgive, the other person and we never meet again. We each go about our separate ways. But to offer forgiveness to the extent that the one who forgives takes an ongoing interest in the one who has been forgiven, and who then becomes a positive part of that person's life, is even more admirable. 

When Ian asked if he could call her again, Debbie could have said no. After all, she had taken his call and spoken to him. He would have been reassured that the woman who was in so much pain because of his actions not only agreed to talk to him but wasn't angry with him. That would have meant a great deal to Ian. So Debbie could have said, “No” with a clear conscience, knowing that she had done more than most people would have. But she said, “Yes.” Then when they started corresponding, it wasn’t quick reads dashed off with quick responses. She told of how articulate his letters were, his extensive vocabulary, his thoughtfulness, and how smart he was. And of his remorse.

Debbie offered a lifeline—friendship—to a teenage boy in an unimaginably painful existence. 

In friendship, we tend to ignore the things that separate us and focus on what we have in common. Because we are already friends, it is not difficult to forgive the other person because we share a history of trusting for and caring about each other. When we remember the good times, it's easier to let go of disagreements and misunderstandings.

Developing a friendship with someone you once feared would kill you and who caused the agonizing pain of over forty dental surgeries is remarkable, to say the least. Which explains Ian’s and Debbie’s story being periodically featured in major news media. Such a friendship requires a level of trust far beyond that of ordinary friendship. For Ian, it meant trusting that Debbie wouldn’t hurt him. For Debbie, it meant trusting that Ian wouldn’t hurt her again. 

First, Ian had to trust that this woman he almost killed would not turn on him and find a way to make his situation even worse; for instance, by saying at his resentencing hearings that his remorse was insincere and she had not forgiven him. Or, perhaps even more painful, declare him worthless, a hopeless cause and desert him.

But Debbie had to trust Ian too. Why? After all, how could Ian, a person in prison for life, hurt someone on the outside? 

By disappointing her. 

It took courage and determination for Debbie to choose to trust that Ian would not disappoint her as she supported him through their correspondence, especially when her family and friends discouraged her from doing so. It took courage to trust that her friendship would, in the end, not have been wasted. The recidivism rate for people with backgrounds similar to Ian's is very high in a justice system that focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. 

While Debbie was trying to help Ian, her husband and friends feared that she was suffering from some strange condition, maybe a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which the victim of a kidnapper or abuser develops a psychological bond with the other person. But what was happening was not psychological, it was karmic. It was complicated, as karmic connections invariably are. But in spite of the horrifying way in which it continued in her present life, it brought her back to what appears to have been, at some point in an earlier lifetime, a caring relationship.

Our past actions, our karmas, lead us into a situation. But we have a choice in how to react to what is happening. We can do what we have so often done—choose the easy way and let things unfold without much thought or effort on our part. Or we can choose what is difficult, but that we know is right. 

When Ian came across Debbie's name and phone number in his file, he impulsively called her. And then apologized. There was no watered-down apology, no mumbling of words, no confusion as to what to say and why he was doing it.  Just an honest, concise admission to what he had done: “Miss Baigrie I called to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and to apologize for shooting you in the face.”1

This is a master class in how to apologize. Forget the mumbled “sorry” or even “I’m sorry.” Start with “I, apologize,” and then articulate what the apology is for by naming it. Not just “for shooting you” as in Ian’s case, but “for shooting you in the face.” Sincere, unconditional, and to the point.

Many of us have difficulty admitting to ourselves that we made a mistake. Admitting it to the person we hurt or offended and then offering a complete, honest apology takes courage. Courage that Ian, a teenage boy, clearly summoned up. Then he also summoned the courage to ask Debbie if he could contact her again. And then not only did he do so by writing to her, he shared his poetry with her. 

Ian courageously chose to call and apologize. Debbie courageously chose to accept the call.  Then also forgave him. As she said, her forgiveness came from her acceptance that, as Ian had admitted, he had made a mistake.

Many would have responded to this with “Yes, and now you need to live with the consequences. You need to pay.” Debbie chose not only to acknowledge that Ian had made a mistake but to understand that a thirteen-year-old boy is still a child. She felt that children need to not only live with the consequences of their actions but also need to have the opportunity to learn from them.  

For Ian, Debbie’s friendship was transformative. Instead of thinking of himself as an irredeemable prisoner who had shot an innocent woman in the face, he viewed himself as having been a thirteen-year-old boy who had made a terrible mistake. A boy who was now a man who did not need to be defined by that mistake for the rest of his life. Debbie’s forgiveness and friendship helped Ian to survive eighteen years in solitary confinement, to cease his acting-out behavior, earn his GED, and write his memoir. He was able to not only reform but to thrive.

Debbie has used what happened to change some of her priorities as she refocused her energy. She became a bodybuilder and helps raise money to fund college scholarships for at-risk teens.

Together, Ian and Debbie have spoken about their friendship and forgiveness. And, together, they have shown how friendship and forgiveness, when intertwined, will further enhance both qualities. And all who practice them.

1. https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2017/upstanders-befriending-her-shooter/