June Callwood (1924-2007)

June Rose Callwood, (June 2, 1924 – April 14, 2007) was a Canadian journalist, author and social activist. Her life was unique, as was her death. Check out an article that she wrote for The Walrus entitled "Forgiveness". Even more impressive was her interview on CBC's The Hour just shortly before her death.



Forgiveness
By June Callwood


A small boy in an industrial city in Ontario was beaten severely many times by his father, to the extent that the boy not infrequently required a doctor to stitch up the wounds. His father, a policeman, sincerely believed that if he beat his son with chains, belts, sticks, and his fists, the boy would not grow up to be gay. That boy, now in his thirties and indelibly a gay man, says he will never forgive his father.

“What he did is not forgivable,” the man says with composure. “How can it ever be all right to abuse a child? But I have let it go.”

And a woman, raised on the Prairies in a Finnish home, married a black man and had a son. She showed the infant proudly to her mother, whose reaction was a look of naked disgust. Her mother and that son, now a charming and successful adult, have since developed an affectionate relationship, but the daughter has not forgotten or forgiven the expression on her mother’s face. "The best I can do,” she says, “is that I have stopped hating her.”

The ability to forgive is a central tenet of every major religion in the world — Christian, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic. Those faiths urge followers to forgive their enemies and, indeed, even to find a way to love those who wrong them. As the twenty-first century dawns, however, the world is making a spectacular mess of such pious admonitions. Instead of goodwill, this is the age of anger, the polar opposite of forgiveness. Merciless ethnic, tribal, and religious conflicts dominate every corner of the planet, and in North America individuals live with high levels of wrath that explode as domestic brutality, road rage, vile epithets, and acts of random slaughter.

Many people, like the gay man or the woman in a biracial marriage, find forgiveness an unreasonable dictate. Some assaults on the body or soul are unconscionable, they feel, and forgiveness is simply out of the question. It satisfies the requirements of their humanity that they gradually ease away from the primitive thoughts of revenge that once obsessed them...


Keep reading...

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In 2004, June Callwood was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and refused chemotherapy. "I'm in good shape," she said at the time, "I've lived a long time..."

Click here to watch the heartfelt CBC inverview

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