"Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." Rom. 12:21 These words from the Bible touch on something people everywhere strive for, on both a personal level and as a society. Mankind has, at best, a mixed record with overcoming evil. Yet there are so many individual instances of people rising above it, even under what would seem impossible circumstances, that, intuitively, these examples compel each of us to feel and hope we can do better.
For instance, there's the experience of one man who was held as a prisoner of war between 1942 and 1945 under the very worst conditions imaginable. "I would never have thought it possible," he wrote, "that in our time there could still have been so many different ways of killing...."
Yet even in that prison camp, this writer, Laurens van der Post, observed: "It was amazing how often and how many of my men would confess to me, after some [captor's] excess worse than usual, that for the first time in their lives they had realized the truth, and the dynamic liberating power of the first of the Crucifixion utterances: 'Forgive them for they know not what they do.'...I know only that I came out of prison longing passionately—and I am certain my longing was shared by all the thousands of men who had been with me—that the past would be recognized as the past and instantly buried before it spread another form of putrefaction in the spirit of our time. I thought that the only hope for the future lay in an all-embracing attitude of forgiveness of the peoples who had been our enemies. Forgiveness, my prison experience had taught me, was not mere religious sentimentality; it was as fundamental a law of the human spirit as the law of gravity....if one broke this law of forgiveness one inflicted a mortal wound on one's spirit and became once again a member of the chain-gang of mere cause and effect from which life has labored so long and painfully to escape." Van der Post, The Prisoner and the Bomb (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1971), pp. 12, 133
