Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister’s Killer is a most unusual book. As the subtitle notes, Jeanne Bishop has worked to first forgive and second to reconcile to the man who brutally murdered her sister, sister’s husband and their unborn child.
Change of Heart walks us through from the first few days after Ms. Bishop’s father found the bodies, through a nightmarish fiasco where the FBI tried to connect the murders with Ms. Bishop’s work in the Irish peace movement, to the trial and sentencing of the true murderer, David Biro. That first part of the story is easy. Bad guy commits murder, is found guilty and sentenced.
The second part of the book is harder. Ms. Bishop became active in the anti death penalty movement, successfully lobbying for Illinois to end its capital punishment. She describes how she initially held off from thinking of Biro as a person, putting him in a mental box even while she worked hard to forgive him.
After many years she realized that she needed to go beyond forgiving him in her private thoughts and heart, and instead pray for Biro that he could also receive God’s mercy and loving kindness. Finally she visits him in prison to tell him that she forgave him and this act began an odd relationship. Eventually Biro confessed to her in writing, an act that he recognized would forever make it impossible for him to pretend to innocence.
Biro was legally a minor, although the book implies he was just shy of 18 when he murdered, and Ms. Bishop extended her work to banish capital punishment to also banish the mandatory life-without-parole sentences for minors. She did this knowing that such a sentencing revision could free the man who murdered her family. She believes that we should never assume that a given person cannot be redeemed, cannot be rehabilitated and brought back into society.
Forgiving is hard enough. Spending time face to face with someone you have every reason to hate must be incredibly difficult, and even harder would be to work for their eventual rehabilitation and possible release.
Once I spent several days with a person who found every possible way to annoy me. It was so easy, so enticing, to play back the conversation and insults and dwell on his behavior. It was only afterwards that I realized that such a personal encounter is actually an opportunity to receive God’s grace. Difficult people and troubling experiences give us the chance to first recognize our own failings and sins and second to reach into the well of grace and help that person whether by action or prayer. This isn’t namby pamby “saintliness” but true experience of grace. Ms. Bishop went so far beyond that I have no words to describe her actions.
I recommend this but be aware it is well-written but due to subject matter is not enjoyable reading. I received an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
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