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I remember vividly the first time I considered forgiveness as a subject for my next project. It was not a moment of blinding clarity, an on-the-road-to-Damascus event that would provide material for a dramatic preface. Instead, I experienced a range of conflicting emotions: confusion, fascination, of course, but fear as well. In truth, flight was the dominant impulse.

It happened five years ago on a luminously clear day in Salt Lake City where I was surveying Temple Square trying to find the perfect closing shot for my PBS series, “The Mormons.” I needed an image that could be the last word about this rapidly growing religion born on American soil. I was exhausted. The four long years involved in completing the series were worthy of the epic struggles of the Mormons crossing the plains. There had been the usual logistical and financial problems of any production, but in addition I’d had serious conflicts over questions about the meaning of Mormonism and its place in American religious history.

The spiritual landscape is my beat; I had put down my flag on this territory thirty years ago when I produced my first and still favorite film for ABC about life in a Trappist monastery. It had been a life-changing experience. Others followed. But after a series of documentaries focusing on religion, I came to realize that while this territory is fascinating, provoking the deepest questions, it is not always a land of milk and honey. These subjects could also be contentious, fractious, filled with landmines and exhausting.

So, at the moment when my cell phone rang, I was dreaming of rest in a small Umbrian town to be followed by a small project, richly layered of course, but narrowly focused. Perhaps a biography of an artist—ideally someone who lived in my hometown, New York City. I was bone tired of life on the road so if I could shoot and write everything in my living room, that would have been perfect. I was looking forward to recovering my life.

The phone kept ringing, insistently, while I was staring at the odd surreal beauty of the Mormon Temple trying to find my shot. When I finally answered, a stranger, Paul Dietrich, introduced himself as a global investment manager, a spiritual seeker, and an admirer of my work. Without any small talk, he immediately made a passionate pitch why forgiveness should be my next subject. Barely pausing, Dietrich offered me a fully funded two-hour film and a companion book to be based on it. He concluded with his assurance of complete artistic freedom. A bolt out of the blue. Not the usual way projects are launched.

Given my intense engagement with spiritual themes, the subject was a perfect fit but it was also perfectly wrong. It was everything I had vowed not to do at this point in my life. Forgiveness was larger than the mood I was in after so many epic battles about the Mormons. It was larger than my film about 9/11, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” It was even larger than my most ambitious film about Pope John Paul II, a man whose life intersected with every major event in the twentieth century. Forgiveness was vast, shapeless, emotionally and psychologically scarier than any of my earlier films. The intellectual and geographical boundaries seemed infinite. Where do I begin? How do I structure it? I saw myself back on a road that might take me far from New York City, across the world, around the globe.

Moreover, while forgiveness evokes mystery and power, it also comes with an aura of sentimentality, of hushed reverence and of unexamined New Age pieties. The most egregious: it is always better to forgive than not and someone who remains angry is the lesser for it, a spiritual underachiever.

Before I take on a project, I have an unvarying ritual. I talk to friends, colleagues, and strangers. I roam through libraries and the Internet. I have long lunches with experts. I dream day and night about the topic’s possibilities and its pitfalls. This process allows me to ease into the water gradually—or to get back on shore before it is too late. Such caution is appropriate given that these projects can take years. But with forgiveness, surprisingly, the exploratory process was unusually brief; after only a few weeks I jumped in.

Sometimes I look back on this period, mystified. What was it that I discovered that overrode my reservations so quickly and decisively?

To say that I discovered that forgiveness mattered deeply, urgently and sometimes dangerously to many of the people with whom I spoke sounds banal and obvious, but it wasn’t so to me. Of course, I was no stranger to the strong emotions that surround forgiveness and unforgiveness. I had my critics and I had judged them in turn. I had experienced betrayal as well, and I too had caused emotional injury to those I loved. I knew the pleasure of forgiving and the pain of asking for forgiveness. I knew the corrosive effect of hanging on to resentment. I was also well acquainted with the great works of art informed by forgiveness, where broken relationships are mended in a spirit of humane, even supernatural tolerance. The final scene of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” is possibly the most sublime expression of forgiveness ever expressed in music. The Count has been caught seducing the servant girl and his wife forgives him half-knowing that he will betray her again. Peace returns to their community and all of this underscored and heightened by Mozart’s ravishing shifting harmonies.

However, I had never thought about forgiveness in a disciplined way. I had never taken its measure philosophically and psychologically. I hadn’t talked about it with friends—nor they with me—even though my circle is highly expressive, intimate, and open.

But the minute people knew that I was making this film, the floodgates opened. Friends and strangers would approach me; they would call and write, unburdening themselves. Sometimes, people would pretend they were speaking on someone else’s behalf because the pain and embarrassment of their experience was too much to reveal. In one memorable week at a hospice, while sitting by the bedside of dying patients, I sometimes felt there was no other subject but forgiveness. Of all the topics I had chosen over the last thirty-five years, forgiveness seems to resonate at the deepest and most intense level.

I wondered about this. And then, late one night talking to my friend and advisor Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete, an eloquent priest straight off the pages of a Graham Greene novel, Lorenzo identified it: “The hunger for connection and the terror of going into the night unconnected, unreconciled, is that fundamental.” And then, in words that ultimately were defining for the film and the book, “Forgiveness is a primordial ache in the human heart that precedes all religions, it precedes everything. No matter what the theologians and the religious folks will tell you, religion arrives late on the scene; we provide, at best, structures for this existential ache.”

By the end of two years of research I—along with my team of researchers—had spoken to over eight hundred people across the world. From Rwanda and the killing fields, to truth commissions in Liberia; from the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, to its counterpart in Washington D.C.; from frat houses at Yale to backstage at the MET; from the Amish community in Pennsylvania to Mormon wards in Utah. We had conversations with people in extremis: grieving widows, HIV patients, the angry unemployed, betrayed spouses, defiant genocidaires, survivors of atrocities, repentant criminals, sixties radicals, Vietnam War veterans, Third World truth commissioners, repentant politicians, internet bullies. We also came to know many ordinary men and women grappling with these issues in the most intimate ways. We spoke with scholars in various disciplines: philosophers, psychologists, theologians, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists. I also read (and discounted) much of the ever-growing forgiveness literature brimming with optimism, uninflected by complexity. More fruitful research concentrated on pioneering work in restorative justice, human rights, and reconciliation commissions

Throughout most of these conversations, I detected a powerful undersong of urgency. Forgiveness mattered; it was more than a subject out there—to be found in another country, at academic conferences, in a neighbor’s house or on the front pages. It was searingly personal, and for some it was a matter of life and death. Most startling to me was the realization that personal betrayal, while on a whole other scale compared to mass atrocities, nonetheless could cut as deeply as a machete. There were mini-holocausts, a phrase I use carefully, in the private as well as the public realm. I witnessed domestic feuds that poisoned generations and whose source seemed, at least to an outsider, breathtakingly trivial. Sometimes the original injury had even been forgotten.

Another surprising discovery that richly complicated forgiveness was that there is virtually no consensus about what it is and what it is becoming. As complexity and contradiction is my signature style, this was invigorating. Forgiveness had become a ‘perfect fit’ after all. There is a virtual stew of sharply contested meanings, both religious and secular. The elusive quality of forgiveness brings to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s memorable quote while he struggled—unsuccessfully—to define “pornography.” His solution: “I know it when I see it.” Obviously, the comparison only goes so far. Pornography is concrete, tangible, and arbitrary, while forgiveness is abstract, intangible, and essential. We may see the former but the latter is invisible and certainly of a very different character and value. While unseen, forgiveness is, nonetheless, real and one might rightly say, “I know it when I experience it.” But to even say that, belies its complexity.

And then the ubiquity of forgiveness gave the film and the book a timeliness and a relevance I had not expected. To be honest, I had mixed feelings about this new forgiveness that had migrated into the political sphere, claiming to heal political leaders, institutions, corporations, even nations. It seemed immodest, promiscuous, cheapening. To live in this era of public apology is to experience more often the ridiculous than the sublime. The sight of yet another disgraced politician clutching his wife in front of a bank of microphones is ludicrous; a mass murderer asking for forgiveness in front of a truth commission sometimes seems obscene; Tony Blair apologizing to the Irish for the potato famine, or the Pope for the Crusades, however well intentioned, is questionable. Our Senate apologizing for not apologizing for lynching is absurd. I wondered, along with Theodore Dalrymple, whether all this apologizing “is a form of moral exhibitionism that subverts moral thought.”

Admittedly, the instances of authentic public apology and true political reconciliation are rare, but there have been shining moments and one of them converted me. Early in my research I learned that the most discussed and universally admired public apology in the twentieth century occurred when Willy Brandt fell to his knees in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in 1970. I studied the footage and the photographs for days; it was a revelation. I could see the shock and awe of the crowds staring at him; I could see luminous sincerity on Brandt’s face as he expressed his spontaneous wordless penitence; I could understand, as historians confirmed, why the power of this symbolic gesture changed the history of Polish German relations.

These ideas brought me into this project. They are at the heart of the film and shaped the book. They resonate in my life today. Ultimately, the making of the film was a three-year journey, with sharp turns, dark valleys, and stunning vistas; it was arguably the most meaningful film in my professional career

However, writing the book has, in some respects, brought even greater satisfaction. Both the film and the book are rooted in stories that illumine the heart of forgiveness in all of its facets. I chose these stories for their dramatic power and intellectual richness—for their ability to evoke the contradictions of ‘the new forgiveness.’ But the constraints of time of the documentary form did not allow me to plumb their depths.

I had to relinquish material because of the time limit for the television series. Filmmakers describe this painful process as “throwing your babies overboard.” While the book still takes as its starting point the interviews, I have now been able to expand the voices, to rescue some of my ‘lost babies’ and even to include new material. I returned to brilliant intellectuals whose insights shaped my thinking but who were uncomfortable in front of the camera. In the new introductions and conclusions to each chapter, I have been able to move away from the minimalist haiku style of television narration into my new voice—fuller and more textured, allowing me to provide essential context and analysis.

Writing up these interviews and going back through the printed materials gave me a chance to walk my own walk, talk my own talk about “the ache for connection.” All my films have changed me. This one has been no different. It has taught me how much I had to learn about my own subject. It has sent me on errands of penance and reminded me of my own snares of pride. When penance has been offered to me, I have struggled to practice a deeper humility. And now, more than ever, I try to be alert to “the rumor of angels” that so often goes unnoticed in our own lives.

My hope for the book, Forgiveness:A Time to Love and a Time to Hate, is to inform but not dictate, to raise questions but not answer them. If this encounter results in a radical rethinking of what one understood about forgiveness, I will have succeeded.

Helen Whitney, January 3, 2011