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Toward a Politics of Forgiveness... In the Community of Nations
A Woodstock Forum with Robert Hennemeyer, Doris Donnelly, Drew Christiansen, S.J., and Donald Shriver.
Is there a social and political understanding of forgiveness, one that goes beyond personal and pietistic notions? Does forgiveness have a track record in political and international affairs? What role can religious communities play in helping to build a politics of forgiveness, especially among nations and within fractious societies? These were among the questions taken up at the May 4 Woodstock Forum titled “Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace.” The public forum coincided with the release of a new book by that title, written by three Woodstock non-resident fellows, William Bole, Drew Christiansen, S.J., and Robert T. Hennemeyer. Published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the book is the final product of Woodstock’s project, Forgiveness in Conflict Resolution: Reality and Utility. The forum, moderated by Ambassador Hennemeyer, included presentations by social ethicist Donald W. Shriver Jr., religion scholar Doris Donnelly, and Father Christiansen. Following is an edited version of the discussion.
INTRODUCTION: A NEW HOME
by Robert T. Hennemeyer
Robert T. Hennemeyer is a career foreign service officer who served in several countries including The Gambia, where he was ambassador. He coordinated Woodstock’s project, “Forgiveness in Conflict Resolution: Reality and Utility,” and formerly directed the Office of International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Tonight we’re going to ask you denizens of inside the beltway to suspend your usual air of cynicism, often necessary for survival in this environment, and to try to imagine forgiveness, not in its usual personal and frequently religious context, but as something that is possible in a larger group setting, even in a political dimension. We will try to find a “new home” for forgiveness, to use the phrasing of our first panelist, Dr. Donald Shriver.
Despite Robert Frost’s observation in his poem, “The Star Splitter” that to be social is to be forgiving, the forces of un-forgiveness are formidable, none less so than the pernicious phenomenon of mytho-history, which so often propels the cycle of revenge.
As our invitation stated, since the end of the Cold War, the world has arguably become a less forgiving place. Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, inter-tribal genocide in Rwanda, international terrorism, the crisis in Iraq, and the cultural wars in liberal democracies – all of these have revealed forces of un-forgiveness. At the same time, these forces have propelled the notion of forgiveness into the geo-political conversation. So at this forum, we explore the politics of forgiveness, and the possibilities of a forgiveness-based strategy of international conflict transformation.
DOORWAYS TO SOCIAL FORGIVENESS
A presentation by Donald W. Shriver, Jr.
Donald W. Shriver, Jr., is president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in New York. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Dr. Shriver is author of An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, and the forthcoming Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember its Misdeeds. To summarize in just a few minutes the various locations of forgiveness is no easy assignment. I think reading the book, Forgiveness in International Politics, is a much better way to do it. But the first location in my way of seeing it concerns occasions and political habits which function as overtures or ground preparations for the entrance of forgiveness onto the stage of our collective affairs. When Robert Frost wrote that line, “to be social is to be forgiving,” he had in mind the case of re-establishing some tentative new neighbor relations between a small town society and a convicted criminal newly released from jail. One might call this first preparatory step a gesture of tolerance for persons or groups who we would as soon not have around anymore.
Tolerance at best is a vestibule to forgiveness but tolerance without forgiveness can be only a temporary cover over the sleeping demons of revenge. Whatever else forgiveness is, it is a retreat from murder as a means for building or preserving political power. Perhaps this is the first quiet bid of forbearance from revenge when in the wake of the murder we call war, participants see that they will never achieve their well-being without a form of politics that substitutes dialogue for murder. Diplomacy may be a weak form of politics, but it is morally superior to the failure of diplomacy that is war. Democracy has a stake in keeping the dogs of war penned up. We are being re-informed of that fact in 2004 America. Close to emergence of fragile social tolerance is that moment in the history of violence when humans get so weary of killing that they finally call for a truce. Like the armistice of World War I, truces also make only fragile peace, but they give room for life to go on.
In Sunday’s New York Times an article by Matthew Wald asked whether the recent diplomatic bargain with Muammar al-Qaddafi is consistent with the memory of his terrorist past. Wald agrees however with an observation by one analyst: Justice at all times and in all cases is not worth every price you might have to pay for it. And he agrees as well with Joshua Weiss who thinks about negotiation in terms of whether it can make the world safer for his daughters. Like diplomacy, forgiveness is pragmatic as well as principled. It requires a combination of deontological and consequential ethics. Both are protectors of our life together. But when the overtures are done, it is time to see if there will be a first act of a new social drama.
Enter Forgiveness. The elements of robust forgiveness finally begin to come on stage when moral truth begins to find a new voice.
One has to say that in South Africa, the apartheid regime was less successful than the Nazis in muffling the voices of victims, especially in the realm of international criticism of that regime. One remembers with regret that European Jews found fewer international friends in the 1930s than did South African blacks in the 1980s. Voicing the truth of other people’s suffering may be the necessary prelude to domestic freeing of their own voices. In the 20th century, we made irregular progress towards that sort of international truth telling. Samantha Powers’ account The Age of Genocide is a powerful reminder of the collective human capacity for turning blind eyes and deaf ears to the rampages of violence that happen to people who are not near to us. Moral truth about gross injustice requires just judgment, just restraint, and just punishment. These too are parts of forgiveness. The best of the truth commissions all recognize this and many leaders still hold back from setting up such commissions because they are aware that they are likely to come under judgment if the commissions ever go to work.
One thinks of Bosnia and Northern Ireland as places where historical memories abound. But they abound only to clash. Neither country right now seems close to establishing anything like a truth and reconciliation commission. But such truth is indispensable to a process of forgiveness. In the new book, Joseph Montville speaks from experience when he says that victims of aggression are strongly resistant to pressures to make peace before the aggressors acknowledge the victims' losses and ask forgiveness for their violence.
I say somebody must complement the forgiveness process with a repentance process. It would seem that both can begin almost anywhere in a damaged society in almost any person or small group. But politically speaking, everything eventually depends upon what happens next in growing circles of resonance for a new socially shared imaginative picture of the future, as John Langan suggests in the book. Just such a new picture was in the mind of that Tutsi woman, whose dying words in 1994 were recorded at the end of a New York Times story on the unfolding Rwanda genocide. The Hutu murderer killed her husband and her children before her eyes. As he turned to kill her, she reached into her dress and pulled out her copy of the Bible. “Here,” she said, “read this, for you don’t know what you are doing.” Whether he ever understood her allusion to the dying words of Jesus, we cannot know. But in her own fragile way, she was a pioneer of a new Rwanda.
Beyond the Personal. Everything depends, politically however, on who takes up these little forgiving personal events to make them into social events. I think of Willy Brandt, Anwar Sadat, and King Hussein of Jordan. Brandt’s famous kneeling before the Warsaw monument did not receive immediate public affirmation in 1970 Germany. But it was a step towards forms of national repentance that were going to collect more intensely in Germany in the ensuing decades. Brandt was not assassinated for his gesture. Not so with Sadat, who voiced an eloquent version of empathy for the Israelis after his courageous visit to Jerusalem. His public was not ready for that empathy. He was killed. But we might hope that eventually an Islamic public will celebrate Brandt and Hussein and Anwar Sadat as heroes. As Brandon Grove said of the Brandt gesture, “That is what leaders do in advance of their public.”
Part of Woodstock’s new book is devoted to the development of empathy between hostile groups. And in so doing, it underscores the indispensability of a victim advanced to the earnest question, “Why did they do that to us?” Patience to that question was in low repute after 9/11 in this country. The few citizens who asked for understanding of suicidal bombers got accused of excusing the crimes. One has to ask whether politically enacted suffering closes or opens the door to international empathy. Why does suffering imprison some people away from other people’s suffering, whereas for others, suffering opens the door to empathy with other peoples?
Not every Christian church in the land, Catholic or Protestant, lifts prayers of intercession for the grieving families of the Iraqi dead or expresses glimmers of grief for the 10 to 1 ratio of Iraqi dead to our dead so far. Forgiveness of enemies can hardly get off the ground without a retreat from the dehumanization of enemies.
There is a story in the rabbinic tradition about the Exodus from Egypt, which brought tears to the eyes of God. “Why?” the angels asked. God replied, “Because of all my people, the Egyptians, drowning in the Red Sea.” Well, forgiveness in politics has to be a long story. In its own way, a version of Max Weber’s definition of politics: slow boring of hard boards. The hardness derives from our human propensity for preferring our interests over the interests of others, our security over theirs. It’s the sin that forever clings so closely to both personal and political reality.
It’s Called Leadership. If I had to choose one entry point for forgiveness in politics, I could stick with the notion that it can begin with any person or prophetic group of persons. But the agency that most powerfully advances the cause is the political leader, whose key function in the matter will not often win that leader popularity. I’ve just returned from a fourth visit to South Africa. There you meet numerous witnesses who say, “Without Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, the whole transition might have turned into war.”
So in conclusion, on the last page of anything we write or say about forgiveness in politics, ought to be the affirmation that forgiveness is only a stout political construct when it clears the way for a new future. If it is merely an incidental prelude to repeating the same old past, it remains a political exile, an orphan on the margins of power struggle.
Christians have special reasons for wanting political forms of forgiveness and we have it on good authority that divine and human forgiveness are our doorways to freedom from the prisons of our past sins. But we need to remind each other that we can only honor that liberation by working for the day when we all will have fewer sins to be forgiven.
THE CHURCHES: A UNIQUE HOME OF FORGIVENESS IN POLITICS
A presentation by Drew Christiansen, S.J.
Drew Christiansen, S.J., is associate editor of America magazine and counselor for international affairs to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. A former Woodstock senior fellow, he also directed the bishops’ Office of International Justice and Peace. He has co-edited several books and written more than 90 articles. Today forgiveness is a cottage industry in Washington. It’s now in the public square, and there are lots of people doing very good jobs at it – people who specialize in forgiveness and reconciliation at universities and organizations around the country. But I think even though it’s now a matter of the public square, the churches, especially the western churches, are the natural home of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not found in every church or every religious tradition to the same degree or in the same way. I think the western churches are a special home for forgiveness because they have developed a theology of sin and contrition as well as a practice of confession. They’ve also inspired the separation of church and state, which has allowed for some distance from ethno-religious kinds of commitments. And they are universalistic in their orientation. They’re not nationalistic by and large, not as entrapped by religious ethnic commitments.
Franciscans, Good and Bad. On the other hand, as Douglas Johnston of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy has said, religion is both compromised and capable. I think we saw that especially in the former Yugoslavia. For me it’s capsulated in the picture of two groups of Franciscans: the Franciscans of Herzegovina who represent, I think, the most compromised part of religion in the former Yugoslavia, at least on one side, and the Franciscans of Bosnia, who were the most capable and industrious in trying to build peace across boundaries with Serbs and with Muslims.
I remember very dramatically visiting Herzegovina and being introduced to the Franciscan guardian there. And the guardian, hearing that I was from the bishops’ Office of International Justice and Peace, said, “We don’t need that here.” That summarizes the staunch attitude of ethnic religion on the part of the Herzegovina Franciscans. On the other hand, their fellow Franciscans in Bosnia were probably the most active in trying to create ties across boundaries and rebuild connections to Serbs and Muslims even in the hottest days of fighting. Some years on – I think it was in 1999 – the international Franciscan Order took an action which they hadn’t taken in some 700-plus years of existence. They saw that the Herzegovina Franciscans were really obstinate beyond measure and resisting the peace process. And, parenthetically, I always found that the hardest question to answer in the State Department was, “Why can’t you reign in these priests?” So in 1999, the Franciscan General said they would be defrocked if they didn’t desist from their political activities and put an end to this long history of ethnic religious intransigence.
In South Africa, Desmond Tutu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he led demonstrate the capability of religion to foster transformation in a conflict situation. Tutu, in his book, No Future without Forgiveness, talks about two elements that really contributed to the success of the commission there. The first is a Bantu value called Obuntu, which means belonging to the human community. And he explained that it was because South African blacks had this value and beyond everything else want to heal relationships and be part of relationships, that they were capable of forgiveness. He found, to his dismay, that those same values weren’t transferable elsewhere, in Rwanda and Burundi, for example. They were really quite a part of that unique setting in South Africa. But in addition, he said, people understand there was a religious dimension to the truth and reconciliation process there, and that he was chosen precisely because forgiveness and repentance are religious practices, and because he was a clergyman. And he exercised his role with the skills that he had, asking for prayer, silence, and meditation, calling people into retreat, and sometimes, pushing people to make an apology. And for some famous people, like former President Botha and Winnie Mandela, he wasn’t able to extract any kind of repentant statement.
Intervening Religiously. So what can the churches do? First, they can do training and modeling in conflict resolution and transformation. One place where the Catholic Church has done this in a systematic way is Eastern Slovenia, a small portion of Croatia on the Serbian border that was overrun by the Serbs at the beginning of the war in 1992.
Burundi is another area with a long history of ethnic conflict and a largely Catholic population. This past year, Catholic Relief Services and the U.S. bishops’ conference have been asked by the Burundi bishops to engage with them in a process that will again train people in conflict resolution and the techniques of reconciliation to help prevent conflict there and to foster reconciliation and build a peace for the future.
Secondly, the churches can provide prophetic modeling. One of my favorite models is Cardinal Cahal Daly, former primate of Ireland, who with the Archbishop of Canterbury had an exchange of confessions and expressions of forgiveness in various cathedrals in the British Isles in the late 1990s. And this was before the Good Friday peace process in Northern Ireland.
I think of two other great heroes of the 1990s. One is Cardinal Kuharic of Zagreb, famous for saying: “If someone burns down my house, I will go protect his house. If someone kills my father, I will go protect his father. If someone burns down my church, I will go protect his church.” Kuharic did that over and over again and set an important model. And alongside him and probably standing over him, standing over almost any one in that conflict, was Bishop Komarica of Banja Luka, who was a symbol always of inter-faith cooperation, caring for Muslims and Serbs and Croats in what had been the rectory – over 30 people living in that rectory from the different religious groups, feeding them all every day and speaking out for human rights. Whenever there was pressure on the Muslims, he was immediately at the side of the imam.
We need to preach and teach forgiveness. Any preacher knows that there’s a great deal of natural reluctance to think about forgiveness on the part of a congregation. Forgiveness is hard; it takes a lot of work. Certainly I think we fail still within the Catholic Church to profess forgiveness for the offenses in the sexual abuse scandal, particularly on the part of the hierarchy.
I think many psychologists, including people who work with us here at Woodstock, have also resisted it on the notion that you shouldn’t ask people to forgive in an untimely fashion. I could go on and on with the difficulties. But forgiveness is very close to the heart of the love command. As soon as Paul talks about love, he talks about forgiveness. We need preaching, and we need to teach conflict resolution in our schools. Harvest of Justice, the bishops’ tenth anniversary peace pastoral, talked about non-violence as being the first option of Christians in response to conflict and said that it was not just a private virtue; it was a public virtue, a public obligation.
Bringing Forgiveness Home. And finally, I think we need to contribute to a culture of forgiveness in the United States. We don’t have obuntu in this country. I think our country is increasingly degraded by a very harsh public climate, by a media culture that is increasingly focused on the seven deadly sins. Reality TV, I think, focuses on the most base of human emotions and gets its appeal from that. We need to develop an alternative culture.
We also need to celebrate examples of international forgiveness, and repeat them. Don mentioned King Hussein. And if you don’t remember, King Hussein’s great act was that after a Jordanian soldier killed a number of Israeli school girls on an outing, he came to Israel, visited each family and kissed the feet of the parents. It’s a great deed. It needs to be much better known.
In conclusion, I think the Western churches are a unique, though not exclusive home for forgiveness. We’ve found in the eight years of this project that the work of forgiveness is a reality in the church, and that the church has contributed usefully to processes of forgiveness. It’s not contributed nearly enough and there remains enormous promise for what can be done if the church itself puts forgiveness at the heart of living the Gospel life.
WANTED: AMBASSADORS OF RECONCILIATION
A presentation by Doris Donnelly
Doris Donnelly is a professor of religious studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where she directs The Cardinal Suenens Program in Theology and Church Life. Among her many publications are an edited book of essays, Mary, Woman of Nazareth: Biblical and Theological Perspectives, and two books about forgiveness, Learning to Forgive and Seventy Times Seven. My reference point this evening comes from a letter the apostle Paul wrote to the Christian community of Corinth in Greece. He called the members of that community “ambassadors of reconciliation.”
Ambassadors of reconciliation have a home in all the Abrahamic traditions. And with those traditions in mind, I invite you to consider with me the qualifications we might put into a job description if we were looking for ambassadors of reconciliation. I count five non-negotiable criteria for these ambassadors of reconciliation, and I invite you to think along with me and amend mine and suggest your own.
The Requirements. First qualification for ambassadors of reconciliation, if they are carrying the portfolio of their God, is humility. Humility is about truth. In fact, it’s only about truth. It’s at the fundamental core of facing the truth about ourselves as divided, alienated from our best selves. I am impressed over and over again by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was working in the United States when Hitler came to power, and returned to Germany to establish an underground seminary for Lutherans. There, he established the practice of daily confession for the seminarians. He insisted on this as a spiritual discipline: “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, how will we find it in the midst of all the lies around us?”
On this matter of truth, one tool that has been used effectively to reconstruct societies after violence, trauma, repression, and war, is the establishment of truth and reconciliation commissions. We know the commissions in South Africa and Chile, but at present, there are twenty such commissions operative around the world. In East Timor, in Ghana, in Liberia, in Sierra Leone, to name only four.
Number two in our job description: the ambassador for reconciliation candidate must have hope for the future. Hope is a theological virtue and I think a much-neglected virtue because hope suffers from being the middle child flanked by her two popular sisters, faith and charity. Nevertheless, if there is one virtue needed when it comes to reconciliation in desperate situations where people are suffering and whether that suffering, as Dr. Shriver said, brings people to a fullness or destroys them, it is hope. That is the catalyst that brings them through. Martin Luther King, of course, expressed that hope in his “I Have a Dream” speech.
And there is hope that has been realized by ambassadors of reconciliation. There have been crumbling authoritarian regimes in the past few decades that have been demolished. In the late 1970s – not that long ago – virtually every country was under a dictatorship in South America. By the late 1990s, none of them was – hope.
Another indication of where hope is evidencing results is in Caritas International. Caritas is now working on its third mandate. Its initial mandates were to put the finger in the dyke of the violence and the suffering around the world. The third mandate now is to build with “pre-conflict” intervention. When we’re dealing with forgiveness and reconciliation, we’re dealing with an injury that has already happened. And what Caritas is now doing, before the conflict escalates full-blown and in full force, is to defuse the conflict before it has a chance to really do the harm for which full-blown reconciliation will be needed. You know it’s interesting to think about the words that we use about conflict. We manage it. We resolve it. But never is the word “eliminate” used. You cannot eliminate conflict. Just by being alive, we have conflict.
Third qualification for an ambassador of reconciliation: energy. Lots of energy, but in particular, energy for justice. The role of ambassadors varies, but it always works through conflict and confrontation. This past year, energy for justice has had for me two faces. One of those faces is Sergio Vieira de Mello. You remember him as the United Nations special envoy to Iraq who on August 19th was killed when a yellow cement truck exploded outside the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. His assignment in Iraq was to be brief – four months. In fact, he died five days before his assignment was over. Then he was to return to his assignment, his real job, as it were, as High Commissioner of Human Rights. In that capacity, he deplored in several speeches the economic disparity between the rich and the poor, making it clear that humiliation of people, unemployment, and poverty, all combined as causes of violence, and that the solution lies simply unequivocally in recognizing the dignity of all people.
The other face of energy for justice, for me this past year, was Shirin Abadi. You remember her as the Iranian human rights activist and practicing Muslim who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2003. As a former judge, she was forced to step down after the Iranian revolution, but that didn’t stop her from defending the human rights of those targeted by conservative factions within the Iranian government. Despite numerous imprisonments, Abadi has argued forcefully that Islamic law must be interpreted in a way that upholds freedom of speech and religion and fosters democratic governance.
The “for” words. Characteristic number four for our ambassadors of reconciliation – fortitude. We heard a number of “for” words tonight. We heard the word “forgiveness” and I assume that means a strengthened, extended, empowered form of giving – for-giving. We heard Dr. Shriver use the word “forbearance.” And I assume that’s a strengthened, extended, empowered form of bearing injury. And now we have the word for-titude. I don’t know what “titude” means, do you? But whatever it is, I think the idea is we need more of it, a strengthened, extended form of it if we’re dealing with reconciliation.
The last qualification for ambassadors of reconciliation is to have a spiritual center. Father Robert Schreiter of Catholic Theological Union conducts workshops for relief and development workers, and he tells them 1) it’s very important to be working for reconciliation, and 2) at least in social situations, expect a failure rate of 70 percent. You could look at it with the glass full, and say a success rate of 30 percent. But that’s a very formidable failure rate. Unless you can cope with that kind of a failure rate, you won’t last. And without a sustaining spirituality, he tells them, you cannot survive. Why would there be a 70 percent failure rate?
For one thing, he points to limited resources and personnel. In Rwanda alone, there are 100,000 people who need to be adjudicated, who are guilty of crimes. What Rwanda has found is that in the genocide of the population, lawyers and judges were decimated first. And therefore there is nobody to do the adjudicating.
Father Schreiter also points to the sheer enormity of human situation. In Miami, there are child soldiers from Colombia and Latin America in the city’s public schools. Where, Father Schreiter asks, has any kind of healing taken place for these children? How many lifetimes would it take for that kind of a healing to take place?
But one thing that has been learned, and maybe the most important thing of all, comes again from the Apostle Paul – that reconciliation is God’s work, God’s dream for the world, and that we only participate in it. We don’t reconcile; it’s God who reconciles. We participate humbly, with energy for justice, with confidence, with hope, with fortitude, perseverance because we know the stakes involved –- the welfare of humanity.
FORGIVENESS AND THE POST-CHRISTIAN ELITE:
A question from the audienceGiven that the political classes in the Western world, the politically dominant world, are largely post-Christian, or at least agnostic, can they be effective purveyors of forgiveness?
Father Christiansen: Well, I think not. There are a lot of people who are writing about policy today and making policy, who clearly reject Judeo-Christian values. There are ultra-realists when it comes to international affairs, although they have a veneer of democracy to justify what they propose. But by and large, they would reject the kinds of values in which the reconciliation process takes place. There are still people in public life willing to pursue things like forgiveness. Jimmy Carter is a good example. But I think they are rarer and rarer and the media in various ways have been taken over by people with these very “realist” notions and the culture wars continue and the fight against these values is very hard.
Dr. Shriver: My own take on that is somewhat different. If there is a secular reality of forgiveness that can be promoted without necessarily asking the forgiver to believe in Christian theology, then we must promote that forgiveness. I would have to say it is probably an attenuated notion of forgiveness. But on the other hand, when Robert Frost wrote that line, “to be social is to be forgiving,” he did not write as a very obviously religious person. He was really commending the necessity of a certain amount of forgiveness for people of finitude and sin to live together. And I would still promote that. I would hesitate to think that only in religion could we find the strong argument for forgiveness in politics.
Father Christiansen: I agree on this point with Don. But I think it’s really important to understand that there is a war being waged, whether it’s with secular understandings of forgiveness or with religious and Christian ones. I think that’s part of the reality of the world we live in.
Dr. Donnelly: I think it’s always hard to think about forgiveness because forgiveness isn’t easy and it takes time. And some wounds are so fresh and so raw that to broach the subject of forgiveness is actually inappropriate. I think what Don Shriver said about looking at the person and seeing if one can see something more than the deed that that person did, is a very good start in the area of forgiveness. But it seems to me that first of all, what’s important before forgiveness is taking account of the hurt that’s been done, feeling the pain, understanding that somebody really inflicted this injury on us. And then with all of our wits about us, wherever that hurt is in us, counting on a strength and a power, asking for the help of God to go under that pain with that power and release it.
How should we go about preaching forgiveness? Slowly. Slowly. First taking account of the pain and letting people cry, letting people rage about what that pain has done to them, and then gently showing the options. The options are retaliation. The options are revenge. The options are hate. The options are more violence. And none of them work. History tells us they don’t work. And in our hearts we know they’re not going to work. And then, reaching gently for the option of forgiveness and leading people gently into that space. I think it takes an awful lot of courage.