To quote Martin Luther King Jr, ‘[t] he fierce urgency of now’ (Washington, 1986: 167, emphasis added) is our concern. The ‘nowness’ of redemption enables an analysis of the relationships between the perpetrators of crime, their victims and wider society, and new inclusionary and creative strategies to be informed through a radical awareness of the ‘here and now’. The ancient Greek word arche denotes a beginning or source of action (for example archaeology) and in the French, the same word denotes a place of safety. Redemption is a space where the infinite (transcendent/virtual) is actualized in the finite (immanent) (von Baltasar, 1990; Shestov, 2016) thus allowing for creativity and innovation and a safe place of being.

Poiesis

This creativity comes from poiesis, as an immanent apprehension of the other. This apprehension (seeing) seeks an actualization (embodiment) of the new by understanding forgiveness as a space of possibility, the place to start rather than the end point (see Chapter 2) of a process. In Greek philosophy poiesis is the bringing forth of something new and is the foundation for poetry and poetics. Heidegger saw this making new as emergence in the form of the blossoming of the blossom, or the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. For Plato the new that emerges is a shadow of its true reality, and he rejected poiesis as its creativity was threatening to social order, so much so that he expelled poets from his Republic ‘[b] ecause it has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters …’ (Plato, 2003: 349). For Aristotle emergence is always a form of mimesis (see Chapter 4), with its own inherent potential and drive. Our argument is that poiesis and an occupation of the space of possibility un-conceals (think of the way in which the blossom is revealed through its motion from the inside out) the dynamics of structure (matter), agency (mind) and time, with each enfolded in the other, and is able to differentiate between a non-competitive mimesis and an acquisitive mimesis as the basis of ethical choices (see Chapter 4).

For Bachelard (1969) poetics opens the way for creative imagination requiring active participation with the other and for which there can be no passive phenomenology.