February 1, 2011 | Célestin Musekura’s mother had been presumed dead in the 1992 Rwandan genocide. Many months later, though nearly their entire village had been destroyed, she was found alive.

A decade later, Musekura recounted the tale to L. Gregory Jones, then the dean of Duke Divinity School, over dinner. Jones asked Musekura where his mother was now.

“At home in Rwanda,” Musekura said.

“And who cares for her?” Jones said.

“A man whose family killed my father and our neighbors.”

Jones describes his reaction to the exchange in the book “Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace”: “I stopped eating and stared in wonder at the man across the table. I have taught classes, given lectures and written a book on forgiveness. Here was one who has lived it. The gift of a friendship with someone like Célestin is that you get to see with your own eyes that it is possible to embody forgiveness in the worst of this world’s brokenness. ...

“But how do we learn to live it ourselves? How do we move from hearing that forgiveness is possible to embodying its reality now?”

That’s what Jones and Musekura, founder of African Leadership and Reconciliation Ministries (ALARM), which trains civilian and religious leaders across east and central Africa in character building, theology, conflict resolution, community development and forgiveness, set out to answer in “Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven.” The book, which they co-wrote, interweaves Musekura’s story with a guide on cultivating the habits of forgiveness.

The following excerpt from a chapter written by Jones outlines six steps to embodying forgiveness.

Practicing for the big dance

I have a friend who recalls taking ballroom dancing lessons on Thursday nights when he was in high school. The instructor was a stern old German man who broke the waltz into its basic steps, demonstrated each move with clear definition and then barked out numbers while each member of the class practiced. Having signed up for the class in the hopes that it would help him impress the girls at the homecoming dance, my friend almost lost his resolve. There was nothing graceful about his jerky movements or the cadence of a waltz barked in a thick German accent. But after a few weeks of practice, the old German instructor put an album on the record player, grabbed one of the young women in the class and swept her off her feet, spinning around the room with her in graceful circles. My friend says he decided to stay and finish the course when he finally saw how all the steps came together to make a dance.

One of the ways Christian theologians have described the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is as a dance in which three persons, always giving themselves to one another in perfect love, are at the same time three and one. The love of the Trinity spills over into their love for us, people who are created by God for communion. Because forgiveness is at the heart of the God whom we worship as Trinity, we are swept up into that movement of God’s love when, by the power of the Spirit through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, we join the divine dance by being forgiven so we can also forgive. Nothing in this world is more beautiful than seeing broken people healed through God’s forgiveness, learned and lived in the body of Christ, as they are swept up into God’s dance.

But learning the dance of forgiveness is not easy. Our hearts, souls, minds and bodies are deeply formed by the habits of sin and evil. Despite our destiny for communion, we human beings do not typically give and receive freely with one another, and certainly not with any trusting expectation. Instead, we often attempt to secure our lives at the expense of others. In short, we are well practiced in the steps that lead to mutual destruction and death while we know precious little of the steps that make up the divine dance of forgiveness.

So, at the risk of causing the same frustration my friend experienced in his high school dance lessons, I want to outline six steps of the dance that we are invited into as we learn to embody forgiveness. Learning the alternative life-giving way of forgiveness takes time and involves hard work. It happens as we practice these steps in real community with other people, depending on God’s Spirit to guide us as our thoughts and desires are being transformed. In learning the dance we discover that our movements are undergirded by God’s grace, shaped and sustained by the power of the Spirit.

The six steps, which follow, can be identified separately to help us in rehearsal. But when it comes to the Big Dance -- life in beloved community -- they are integrally related, as inseparable as the graceful movements of two people spinning together around a dance floor.

Truth telling

Step 1: We become willing to speak truthfully and patiently about the conflicts that have arisen. This is not easy, not the least because we often cannot even agree about what it is that happened. It’s hard enough with two people, and becomes immeasurably more complicated when multiple parties are involved. This is why we need not only honesty but also patience, the virtue that the ancient theologian Tertullian called “the mother of mercy.” When we try to be patient and truthful, we can discern more clearly what is going on.

In a gathering that was hosted at Duke Divinity School, a man from Burundi reflected on the racial classifications of “Hutu” and “Tutsi,” the distinction that had meant life or death in Rwanda’s genocide. He recalled how, when he was growing up, he was told that Tutsis were tall people with long noses and Hutus were short people with small noses. This always confused him, however, because his mother was taller than his father, though she was classified as a Hutu and he as a Tutsi. These inconsistencies forced him to ask where such a classification system had come from and why it was so important. Struggling with that question in a Christian fellowship in college, he had begun to see how the gospel challenged divisions he had inherited and assumed. Many years later, he runs a Christian reconciliation ministry in his home country.

Churches are often fragmented by divisions that, like “Hutu” and “Tutsi” classifications, are fraught with inconsistency yet hard to name because they are so much a part of our daily lives. We cannot pretend that these divisions simply disappear when we accept Jesus as our personal Savior, get baptized or commit ourselves to the ministry of reconciliation. We must, rather, take the time to talk to one another about the things that divide us. This is an urgent task, Jesus insists -- more important, even, than our offerings to God: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24). Wherever we are, we must begin now. But we cannot assume that every conflict will be resolved by sundown. While we must be quick to take this first step, the response we hope for requires patience. Forgiveness takes time.