LYCHEE: Responses to The Kite Runner

I just finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It has been a long time since a book a made me cry. Not just a silent crying that a good book will invoke as it connects to your heart, but physical tears that make you have to put down the book whose pages blur as the book touches your soul.

Over the past several months, my life’s journey has come to focus on forgiveness. My inability to forgive someone I love has led me to attempt to understand better understand forgiveness, leading me in turn to deepen my spiritual practice through yoga and religion. In a discipleship class, when asked what would we ask God if we had a half hour to spend with God, my big question was how do we truly forgive? Hosseini takes us on a journey to find an answer to this question in this beautifully written novel about the darkest and most noble parts of the human soul, parts that exist in each of us.

While The Kite Runner is often known as a story about life in Afghanistan, this is not where the power of the story lies. True, it is fascinatingly heartwarming and heartbreaking to learn about Afghani culture, a culture often misunderstood, misrepresented, or ignored in the U.S. For Afghans, it must be wonderful to see the wisdom and humanity of their lives woven into this tale that explores themes that reach everyone. It is at this level of basis human pain and truth that we connect to the Amir’s story. Like Amir, Hassan, Baba, and Soraya, we, too, have had to make life-altering decisions. When do we take a stand and when to we sit by and watch, thinking we are protecting our own well-being? What are the consequences of the choices we make? How do we live with ourselves, with our own truth that we have constructed? In the end how do we forgive others and ourselves? How do we move on to do good?

And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

I know that in the end God will forgive. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But, most important, forgive yourself. (Hosseini 302)

Though this answer is not revolutionary, it is something we all hear or say from time to time, Hosseini moves us beyond this known truth, follow the truth through the sacrifices and work that such forgiveness requires of us. The sacrifice, in this case, being an unburdening, a liberation from our own guilt, not a giving up or denial of something we need. Additionally, forgiveness is something found not through one act, one deed, but something that comes to us slowly as we do the work of moving forward, of believing in goodness and love despite our pain or the pain others have caused us.

Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it. . . . I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with the pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night. (Hosseini 359)

In the end, regardless of religion or ethnicity, we must remember that we are all obligated to show compassion for each other and for ourselves. And this requires patience: “Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time . . .” and we should celebrate and be thankful for the melting of each flake (Hosseini 371).