| As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda |  | Author: Catherine Claire Larson
Publisher: Zondervan
Category: Book
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Seller: cbobooks
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 45,998
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0310287308
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.571043
EAN: 9780310287308
ASIN: 0310287308
Publication Date: February 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Can a country known for its radical brutality become a country known for an even more radical forgiveness? More than a decade after the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has released tens of thousands of murderers back into the communities they ravaged. Survivors and perpetrators have had to learn to live again as neighbors. Inspired by the award-winning film As We Forgive, this book explores the pain, the mystery, and the hope through seven compelling stories as victims, orphans, widows, and perpetrators journey toward reconciliation.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
Heart-breaking stories of suffering, moving stories of radical forgiveness February 4, 2009
G. Lucke
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
The prospect of reading Catherine Claire Larson's As We Forgive both repelled me and attracted me. I've got little stomach for stories of humans torturing, maiming and killing others; I want to look away. Yet the title told me that something uncommon had happened-- that victims had forgiven their brutalizers.
Larson does tell the stories of suffering in detail. Her friendship with victims and knowledge of their stories, narrated in vivid prose, is heart-breaking. Rwandans did vicious, awful things to one another. Larson does not look away.
What was so surprising, after learning of the brutality in detail, is how Larson's subjects slowly came to forgive their enemies. It's hard to believe. I think of the slights and shuns and petty avengement in my docile suburban world, and how friends will say, "I'm not speaking to him," and it all seems so silly when those who were repeatedly tormented and had their loved ones slain can forgive ultimate horror.
Larson provoked me to think about my relationships at a deeper level, but also how collectives and institutions might also contemplate forgiveness of wrongs done to them.
Through it all Larson writes with verve and wisdom that makes for enlivened reading, and she points to a depth and richness of HOPE that I've rarely experienced. This is a great book.
Timothy McConnell (CommonGroundsOnline) reviews As We Forgive February 3, 2009
Timothy McConnell (Charlottesville, VA)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
[...]
Inspired by and building upon the two documentaries As We Forgive (Laura Waters Hinson) and We Are All Rwandans (Debs Gardner-Patterson), Catherine Claire Larson explores the dark hours of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in even greater depth and power by retelling not only the harrowing stories of survival, but the miraculous accounts of forgiveness. The stories she recounts are heart-wrenching, stomach-turning experiences of the absolute worst of human sinfulness matched only by the awe-inspiring moments of forgiveness made possible through the grace of God in Christ.
The effect of this book is to put one's own life in new perspective. When the stories of terror are met with the miracles of forgiveness, one's own experiences of grief, trial and guilt pale in comparison. This is not only a book for those interested in the horror of the Rwandan genocide and afterward; this is a book for anyone who has ever been wronged or has ever wronged another.
Larson leads the reader through seven different accounts of personal experiences. It is difficult to find words to sum these experiences up, except to say that the reader is asked to share with the victims in the horrors of rape, dismemberment, burnings and abandonments. Relatives are killed in the sight of loved ones, fathers in the plain view of their children. Even clergy and officials participate in mass killings of Tutsi people, who they have categorized as "cockroaches." The absolute worst in human nature is on display here. With each story of horror and survival, an accompanying miracle emerges: forgiveness.
What struck me in reading was the fundamental truth that forgiveness is unnatural; forgiveness cannot naturally follow what these victims endured. It is not natural for a girl who has been mauled, raped, and left for dead to grow to offer forgiveness to her terrorizers. It is not natural for a boy who watched his father and family killed by neighbors he knew to turn to them with grace and favor. Forgiveness is an intervention. It is some sort of divine intervention that must enter from another plane of existence. In these stories, it is brought in by Christ himself, who has borne the stripes, the suffering and the death, the worst of all that human sinfulness can bring to bear, and has looked with compassion on us and called for forgiveness from the cross. And forgiveness heals the heart.
Larson provides the reader with interludes between accounts to discuss the meaning of forgiveness. These interludes engage the reader immediately with the challenge to practice forgiveness in his or her own life. They are rich in theological and psychological resource, but their real power is in their juxtaposition to the astounding accounts of Rwandan Christian faith. The reader is transformed by the application of these testimonies in his or her own life. It's not just about Rwanda, its about being a Christian and being forgiven by God "as we forgive those who sin against us."
The principles of the Christian life can be discussed in the abstract, but eventually they must be put into play in the great drama of human history. The Spring of 1994 in Rwanda is such a moment. The release of genocide participants back into their communities over the last few years has produced such a moment. Catherine Claire Larson has captured these moments for you and me. As I read I could see the faces of these Rwandan Christians. You will know them just as well when you read; and you will be moved by their witness to Christ, and the power of His forgiveness.
Beautiful and heartbreaking February 25, 2009
K. Steakley (Virginia)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Catherine has taken a brave journey that few of us would wish to take, but that all of us will be the better for joining her on--a journey into the evil and terror of genocide...and back out again, on the other side, into the grace and unfathomable hope of forgiveness. Writing beautifully with the heart of a storyteller, Catherine introduces us to genocide survivors and perpetrators, ordinary men and women, boys and girls whose lives were never the same after the awful events that took place during 100 days in 1994. The stories are heartbreakingly, unutterably sad. How could neighbors wield machetes against their neighbors, their friends, children? And yet, as Catherine shows us, the madness that consumed the nation of Rwanda is the same madness that invades our own hearts when we hold a grudge, turn a back on a friend, curse that driver in front of us. The small petty grievances that we allow to pile up day after day have the same root as the unspeakable, unthinkable horror of a national genocide.
This book is not easy to read, but it is necessary to read. We all need to know that we are forgiven and that we are capable of forgiving even the most heinous and outrageous of offenses. The awful history of Rwanda can teach us all the profound truth of our own guilt and the almost unbearable grace of forgiveness.
This book will change your life. And I'm not one to write cliche. February 21, 2009
Mary E. DeMuth (Texas)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
As We Forgive by Catherine Claire Larson is one of those life-changing books that will linger with you the rest of your life. It's not for the fainthearted. It's not for the hard-hearted or those bent toward stubborn unforgiveness. It's primarily a story of hope.
During 100 days of 1994 800,000 people were brutally murdered in Rwanda--a genocide swifter in execution than Nazi gas chambers. Imagine Denver and Colorado Springs--every man, woman and child--suddenly gone from our population and you'll appreciate the scope of the horror. (And go look on a map of Africa. Trace your finger due South of Uganda, due West of the Congo and you'll appreciate how little this country is.)
As We Forgive shares the stories of genocide survivors, recounting the unspeakable. But it does not stop there. Larson pulls back the curtain of the most ostentatious acts of forgiveness I've witnessed, where genocide survivors choose to forgive those who perpetrated such violence.
Together, through reconciliation practices and restorative justice, they are rebuilding their country from the ruins of hatred--all on the back of the One who still bears the scars for our sins today.
I came away from this book changed, deeply moved, and inspired. Having seen the power of God to help people forgive the seeming unforgiveable, it gave me hope that my own wrestling with forgiveness would end in hope. I also appreciated that none of the forgiveness modeled was simple or easy or quickly won, nor does the book purport that reconciliation is merely forgiveness while forgetting. For true restoration to occur, the person perpetrating the atrocity must first fully own his/her own sin and grieve it as such. And for the person who was sinned against to heal, he/she must revisit the place of grief in order to heal.
All this dovetails beautifully into the message God's been birthing in me--to help people who suffer silently to tell the truth about their pasts, to choose the difficult path of forgiveness, in order to heal.
If God can reach into a genocide victim's heart and offer peace; if He can transform a murderer into a productive member of a reconciled society; then surely He can transform your pain today. That's the patent hope this book gives. It's a gift to all of us. And I pray it's a gift all open.
A Beautifully Written, Deeply Touching, Powerfully Moving Chronicle June 10, 2009
FaithfulReader.com (New York, New York)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Few stories of cultural transformation are as compelling as the story of Rwanda's ongoing recovery from the unthinkable brutality the country suffered in the spring of 1994. As the 15th anniversary of the horrific genocide approaches in April 2009, a number of books, films and documentaries are being released not only to remind people of the horror but also to show them the remarkable progress toward reconciliation and healing that the country is experiencing today.
That progress is nothing short of a miracle --- not by the trite use of the word "miracle" that has been cheapened by overuse and misapplication, but miracle in the purest sense: a change brought about by divine intervention in human affairs.
The reasons for the Rwandan genocide are complex and tangled up in a web of international interference in the country's government, but the result of the massive killings is clear: hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi tribe were slaughtered, raped, dismembered and tortured in other ways by Hutu tribe members who had once been their friends and neighbors.
No family was unaffected. What the survivors experienced and witnessed left unimaginable scars. And then, in a desperate attempt to ensure the survival of the nation and its people 10 years later, the post-conflict Rwandan government asked the seemingly impossible of the surviving Tutsi refugees who had returned to their homeland: allow some 50,000 Hutu war criminals to return to society and live among them.
This is the story Larson tells so compellingly in AS WE FORGIVE, the story of radical forgiveness sought by the perpetrators and extended by the victims. What sets Larson's book apart from others commemorating the anniversary is the personal faces of forgiveness that she portrays. Larson tells the stories of more than a dozen Rwandans, some killers, some survivors, who are all struggling to move forward even as they are unable to erase the memory of the past.
The stories are difficult to read --- the account of a four-year-old huddled in the brush, hiding with her mother and baby sister as their home is torched and her father is butchered by a machete-wielding neighbor; a young teenage boy's memory of the night his sleep was shattered by a grenade that left his mother bloodied and mangled and by the sound of soldiers brutally raping his older sister; and so many more. But in reading them, readers see the miracle, the hand of God in the lives of those Rwandans who chose forgiveness over revenge and so many other possibilities.
Larson wisely intersperses these stories with reflections on various aspects of forgiveness, providing a much-needed break from both the profound sadness and incomprehensible hope the stories convey. Larson's is no academic, historical account; it's a beautifully written, deeply touching, powerfully moving chronicle of lives once torn apart that are now on the path to restoration.
AS WE FORGIVE is among the best of the many books on Rwanda. Highly recommended.
--- Reviewed by Marcia Ford
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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