FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US …

Forgiveness is superhuman.
I mean “super” in the sense that it requires us to go beyond our human-ness to get there.

It’s a thought that surfaced repeatedly as I watched year-old images of battered, desperate New Orleanians, abandoned in an ocean of chaos and sorrow.

A year after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, a different kind of devastation lingers.

No, it lurks. In the hearts of many folks who live (or used to live) along the Gulf Coast. In the minds of families living in Middle Eastern war zones. In the souls of millions of displaced, injured, terrified people in Sudan. In my spirit, and probably in yours, too, if you’re honest about it.

There’s so much pain, so much bitterness, so many walking wounded — physically, mentally, spiritually.

How do you even begin to heal all of that?

Forgiveness seems at once too simple and much too hard.

During these tense times in the global village, the chances of forgiving or being forgiven feel as slim as the odds that I might be able to master the Brazilian art of Capoeira, memorize the collected works of Marcel Proust — in French — and fit into my 1980 Girl Scout uniform by Saturday.

So thank God for the Internet, wherein lies our hope.

Last month, the National Jewish Outreach Program launched a Web site called Project Forgiveness, where people can ask for forgiveness for past transgressions — against another person, against God, against themselves — or offer forgiveness to another anonymously.

The idea is to offer a safe place to get the universal forgiveness ball rolling, one person at a time.

On Thursday, the latest anonymous entry said simply: “Papa, sorry I broke curfew again.”

The month leading up to Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year (Sept. 23-24 this year) — is considered a propitious time for forgiveness, Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald, founder of the National Jewish Outreach Program, said.

“We have this concept that God is in the fields,” Buchwald said. “He’s not in his temple, he’s not in his abodes . . . he’s not transcendent. He’s very, very imminent. He comes out to the fields, to the people in the fields, begging them, ‘OK, come to me and just ask for forgiveness.’

“God is coming out and waving to you, and if you’ll just make that little gesture, he will be there,” the rabbi continued, launching into an old Hasidic story about another rabbi who once asked his congregation how far east was from west.

“They’re sitting there dumbfounded, and [the rabbi] says, ‘One little . . . spin.’ If you turn right, you’re facing east, and if you turn left, you’re facing west. We have this sense of just overwhelming proportions and that everything is just so hard, everything is just so distanced.

“But the truth of the matter is, there’s just a little turn that you have to make, and suddenly you’re in a new place.”

A little turn.
Two little words.
One anonymous e-mail.

Since the Project Forgiveness blog went up last month, dozens of people have posted confessions and absolutions anonymously.

Some were long and complicated messages: “I am sorry for blaming you for my second marriage gone wrong. It was wrong of me to spread rumors and make up stories to make myself look good and make you, an innocent bystander, look bad. . . . Please forgive me.”

Others were painfully poignant in their brevity: “You walked. I waited. I hurt. I forgive.”

And then there was this message, with a picture of two adorable little girls: “I’m sorry I lose my temper. I’m sorry I work so much. I’m sorry I don’t play more. I’ll try harder.”

It was signed, “Mommy.”

Small sins (if you believe in a hierarchy for such things.) Huge quests for forgiveness.

As I was surfing to the Project Forgiveness Web site the other day, I mistyped and wound up at an equally compelling site for the Forgiveness Project, a nonreligious organization based in Britain that has collected remarkable stories of forgiveness from around the world — Northern Ireland, Israel, Rwanda, South Africa, New York City.

If you’re having trouble asking your partner to forgive you for being selfish, or if you’re still holding on to anger about something ridiculous your boss said three years ago, spend a few times on the Forgiveness Project site. It’ll change your perspective in a hurry.

Read Gill Hicks’ story. Her picture, seen at the top of this post, (each story is illustrated with a portrait of the person telling it) put me in my place. She’s sitting on a couch — a young woman looking straight at the camera with a benign expression on her face and stumps where her legs used to be.

Hicks lost both legs beneath the knees in the July 2005 terrorist attacks on the London Underground.

She says, “I wish the world would Stop — just stop and give us all the time to see what is happening. . . . When will the final bomb explode? When will enough be enough?

“The cycle has to stop — I cannot hate the person who has done this to me,” says Hicks, who calls her horrific experience in the bombings a “blessed gift.”

“The cycle must end with me,” she says.

Forgiveness is, by definition, an unfair endeavor. It can be neither demanded nor forced. But it is the only chance we have to end the never-ending revolution of unforgiveness.

One small turn — or the click of a (mighty) mouse — could do it.

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