Une Minute avec Marie
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Forgiving the men who killed my parents and brother was a process, a journey into deeper and deeper prayer,” Immaculée Ilibagiza told me as we sat in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel last June. Intense prayer, she said, had helped her survive the three months that she and several other women lay crammed into a small bathroom in the home of a Protestant pastor near her home in the western province of Kibuye, on Lake Kivu. Pastor Murinzi, a Hutu, did not share in the ethnic hatred between Hutu and Tutsi that burst forth in Rwanda in 1994. He took in the eight Tutsi women who begged for refuge at his home. Immaculée’s father had sent her running to the pastor’s house when a crowd of machete-armed Hutu bore down on the family’s home in Mataba in western Rwanda. But her father did not survive, nor did her mother, who was chopped down in front of their house, nor did a beloved brother, Damascene, who was tracked down and murdered weeks later after a presumed friend betrayed his hiding place.
Ms. Ilibagiza has described her experiences in two books, Left to Tell and Led by Faith. During our interview, she described some steps of her interior journey: from hatred and a desire for revenge to compassion and forgiveness. Her faith, she said, was rooted largely in devotion to Mary. As she recited the Rosary, a verse from the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”) helped to begin an inner transformation even as she lay in hiding. Those days were filled with terror, because machete-wielding Hutu frequently searched the pastor’s house.
Immaculée still had the red and white rosary her father had given her before rushing her to the pastor’s house. Every day upon waking at 6 a.m., she recited the Rosary of the seven sorrows, beginning with Simeon’s words to Mary that a sword would pierce her heart. In our conversation, she stressed that she said these prayers from deep within, meaning deeply each word. Again and again, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those” resonated ever more deeply in her heart. “If God really is the father of everyone, including the Hutu who were carrying out the slaughter and looking for me by name—I could hear them calling me as they periodically circled the house,” she said. “How could I keep wishing I could destroy them?” She felt she would be lying to God. She also saw an inner image of Jesus on the cross and heard his words, “Forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.”