My nation's history lives in me.

How can I come to terms with good and evil in my nation's history? Many argue for a `ledger approach--the bad I genuinely regret, but balanced against this is the fact `I' didn't do it; those responsible were people of their day; and besides, much good was also done.

I have discovered recently, when thinking about Australian history, that there is an absolute difference between true good and false good, the enemy of the best.

Solzhenitsyn found that the line between good and evil lay within. The shattering part is owning that evil. This involves the death of my self-righteous pride, breaks all self-justification and casts me in utter helplessness upon the grace and mercy and forgiveness of God. I resist this `owning' to the end, such is the pain of its reckoning. It is literally a death-to-self experience.

The irony is that it is only in an unconditional reckoning with the evil within that I then discover the good. This true good, so long imprisoned by the shackles of self-justification, can begin to grow; yet I intuitively know it is not `my' good, but originates in God.

In 1836 a notable and brutal massacre of Aboriginal people took place at Myall Creek in Australia--notable because it was the first time perpetrators were brought to trial. As I looked at whist happened there, I could see myself in those who committed the crime (given the circumstances I could have done the same), but I could also see myself in those who risked their lives and reputations to speak out for the truth.

This is the good I have not really wanted to discover--for it can only be found by facing the evil within me. The `good' which can be seen apart from this profound reckoning with evil is far less costly. This is the good I attribute not to God but to myself, the good I use to `balance' or justify the bad.

I was shattered to realize that the good of our history was flawed, simply because, in general, it had failed to reckon with the evil within. And yet isn't this the good that underlies so much of the Aussie good life, the American dream, the British Empire or, for that matter, Western civilization?

This false good is so damaging in its deception. I depend on the `good' instead of God. So the position I take always feels righteous. We judge Germany and Japan for their roles in World War II, as if the evil was only theirs. I see now why Irene Laure, the French resistance leader whose son was tortured by the Gestapo, went to Germany not to say, `I forgive you,' but, `forgive me'. She realized as early as 1946 that it is only when one reckons with the evil within oneself that one can forgive others.

Being well-meaning is not enough. Right may be on my side, but I am still unknowing of what is in me. During the US civil war, President Lincoln held that had he been born in the south he would have held southern views. He was forced to fight on principle, but it was with a heavy heart, and with compassionate terms of surrender.

The real issue is not coming to terms with the evil of history as history, but coming to terms with the evil in my nation now (which is to say in myself). History reveals the patterns of shutting out God and others passed on to me down the generations.

Above all, history is a mirror to the reality that there is no evil of which I am not capable but for God's grace; there is no good of which I am not capable by God's grace. But the latter is only realized in the daily unconditional reckoning of the former. It is then I cease to be a manager or spectator of life, and become a participant.