This year marks twenty years since I founded The Forgiveness Project. It seems ironic that a charity whose foundation lies in compassion, empathy, and forgiveness was actually driven by anger. In February 2003 I was on a peace march in London protesting loudly against the imminent invasion of Iraq, convinced that the harder you come down on people the more they will regroup in a more vengeful and resistant way. I was appalled by the divisive language of polarization, by the assumption that “if you’re not with us you’re against us.” For this reason, as a journalist, I started to collect stories that were countercultural, a deliberate antidote to the pervasive narratives of demonization and hate.

These stories, from victims and perpetrators, became The F Word – an exhibition of individuals who had reconciled with pain by drawing a line under the dogma of vengeance. They demonstrated how people had sought peaceful solutions to conflict and found meaning in their suffering. As stated by one of the storytellers (a former gang member from Los Angeles whose son was killed in youth violence), “Where the wounds are, the gift lies.”

I called these testimonies restorative narratives; they seemed to tap into a deep public need to find hope in places of despair. The astonishing success of the exhibition led me to founding The Forgiveness Project – a charity that collects and shares personal stories. Our purpose is to demonstrate how individuals and groups can break cycles of pain, reach across division, and find humanity in others.

During the past twenty years we’ve been working with storytellers from around the globe through our prison program, school resource, exhibitions, seminars, and courses. We’ve profiled our work in the media, academic research, arts projects, podcasts, and books. We continue to do this work because of the countless people who have said that The Forgiveness Project has helped them make sense of their own lives, encouraged them to reconcile after estrangement, or shed light on the heartache in the world.

The F-word Exhibition. Photograph courtesy of Maria Cantacuzino.

We don’t attempt to persuade people that they must forgive in order to free themselves from the tangle of hate. Rather, we present alternatives to the cycle of revenge. In fact, forgiveness may be costly, untimely, or inappropriate in certain circumstances. As Julie Nicholson, whose daughter was killed in the London bombings on July 7, 2005, has said: “The whole area of forgiveness is like a huge spectrum.… At one end you have a fracas in the playground, and at the other end you’ve got mass slaughter, and yet you’ve got this one word that is supposed to fit everything.”

My favorite description of forgiveness is attributed to the American author Mark Twain: “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” Forgiveness is messy. It grows out of damage, but is also a healing balm. I’ve learned that the pull to forgive is flexible and changeable, not a one-size-fits-all, nor a single magnanimous gesture in response to an isolated offense. Rather, it is fluid and forever changing, just like the definitions endeavoring to describe it.

Today, with the Israel-Palestine conflict creating a cauldron of blame and competing narratives, such is the level of mistrust and fury that it is hard to imagine forgiveness ever being used as a tool for repair. However, once again, I feel an urgent need to tap into the power of storytelling, because I know firsthand how stories that focus on compassion and connection can change mindsets and enable us to embrace new perspectives.

From the restorative narratives that The Forgiveness Project has collected and shared over many years, there is one critical ingredient to forgiveness that might be of use in this present climate – curiosity. Of course, being curious about your enemy is difficult when people feel threatened, but at an event in London last December, Robi Damelin, a bereaved mother from the Israel-Palestine group the Parents Circle Families Forum, encouraged the audience to stop holding with such certainty to their opinions, and instead reach out and explore the story of perhaps a single Palestinian under siege in Gaza or one Israeli hostage. In a world where bystanders have taken sides, she urged us to rehumanize the other by staying curious about different perspectives. This means that while we still feel the anger and hurt, we learn to respond out of compassion rather than rage.

This curiosity, this empathy, is a quality that embraces a forgiving mindset, accepting that people aren’t simply bad or wrong just because their opinions are diametrically opposed to your own. It requires imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself, which is never easy. As Plato concluded almost two and a half millennia ago, “The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.”