What is Forgiveness? Does it help a person? Isn’t it dangerous to talk about Forgiveness? Can Forgiveness Education be beneficial to a community? Is Forgiveness Education only for Religious people? Is Forgiveness opposed to Justice? What do I do with my anger?

The Forgiveness Education Association’s work involves providing education, experience and conversation about anything to do with Forgiveness. By approaching Forgiveness in a way that invites everybody to contribute – no matter what their personal, religious, educational or philosophical background - the FEA’s programmes seek to enhance understanding and practice of Forgiveness. But what does Forgiveness mean? The model of understanding we use proposes that forgiveness is not weak, but rather is a dignified and dignifying response to a perpetration of hurt. By deciding not to take revenge, and to treat the one who perpetrated the hurt as a human, an individual can discover a sense of meaning, and a sense of inviolable generosity from which to operate. This does not mean that wrongdoing is excused – Forgiveness must always be practiced in harmony and conjunction with justice, societal laws, self protection and plain common sense.

The FEA offers programmes for: Primary 3-7, Junior and Senior secondary levels, youth and community groups, adult groups, counsellors and teachers, congregational use, and the general public.

By providing education on Forgiveness to people from the range of 7 upward, the FEA aims to benefit people by providing simple games, experiences and vocabulary that help articulate painful experiences and their effects and providing understanding on the ways that anger can be turned from a destructive force to a productive force. By leading an individual away from impulses of revenge toward a recognition of the shared humanity of all individuals, as well as honing our energy for meaningful and lasting change where painful situations are continuing to be perpetrated, the FEA’s programmes seek to contribute to the personal health of the participant.

By examining such topics within the context of the Island of Ireland participants are brought into conversations that help them recognize their commonality with those people they may describe as “other” – whether that is the “other” in their classroom, or the “other” from the religious divide, or the “other” from a newly arrived ethnic minority; people are aided in having a worldview that is enhancing of a sense of shared place, community and future. The Forgiveness programme can benefit individuals by emphasizing that Forgiveness is not about forgetting the past, but rather learning how to remember the past in a way that can enhance instead of hinder a peaceful shared future. Forgiveness Education can provide valuable insight into a journey of re-telling a painful story, how to make moves that lead one away from a philosophy of justification-by-revenge, how to speak in a humanising way of those who have caused pain, and how to move toward contributing to a shared future and a community that can sustain itself. We do not think that Forgiveness Education is the final word in the Irish question – rather we see that Forgiveness Education is a part of the tapestry of initiatives and movements that will contribute toward a peaceful future in a society that has been known for division. We happily endorse and recommend other partners, organisations, models and programmes that are working to enhance cohesion in our community.