“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son …” - John 3:16

Bermuda is not struggling to come together. In many ways, it already has. For nearly 50 years, Bermuda Day has shown that we can gather, celebrate and present a shared national identity. That question, whether we can stand together, has been answered.

The one that remains has not. Can we truly forgive those who trespass against us? Perhaps, even more profoundly, can we forgive ourselves when we've been found to have trespassed against others?

Good Friday is a national holiday that invites us all to consider these cardinal questions.

This is not symbolism, it is structure. The type of structure that establishes a simple principle: love, expressed through sacrifice, is the only force that ends cycles of harm and makes healing possible. Everything else rests on that.

There was a time when Bermuda practised that principle. Good Friday was not only a day of kites. It sat within a wider rhythm rooted in the island’s Easter lily trade, in the arrival of spring and in a shared understanding of renewal.

Bermuda was truly another world. An extraordinarily peaceful and secure society and exceptional tourist destination with a floral export industry that embodied this national ethos, regardless of its differences.

Out of that spirit came the Easter Parade: churches, families, merchants, and communities joining together in a way that reflected the full life of the island. It was not just a tradition. It was a structure for healing.

It created a space where the community gathered around one idea. The idea that renewal requires release and healing cannot happen without it. When that structure disappeared after the unrest of the 1960s, Bermuda did not replace what it was doing. It replaced what it looked like.

What came next was necessary. Following the findings of the Wooding Commission of 1968 and Lord Pitt's recommendations in 1978, Bermuda Day was established as a unifying national celebration. It brought people together across lines that had long divided the island. That mattered. It still does. But it answered a different question.

Integration asks whether we can stand side by side. Good Friday asks whether we can heal what has been carried. One creates unity. The other creates restoration. And addressing one does not resolve the other.

The sequence is clear. Harm occurred. It was documented. It was never collectively released. So it remained – not always visible, but always present.

You see it in mistrust that never fully settles. You see it in the decimation of the tourism industry following the 1981 general strike. You see it in a generation that does not fully stay. You see it in conversations about the future that keep returning to the same unresolved ground. Because what is not healed does not disappear. It carries.

More pointedly, vengeance can be the emotional equivalent of releasing the proverbial bull in a china shop.

This is not about blame. It is about healing work left unfinished.

Every society that wishes to move forward in a meaningful way has to be able to do the same thing: name what was done, acknowledge what it cost and create the conditions for healing through deliberate release. Bermuda has not yet done that at scale.

Good Friday is the one day that still holds the space for it. It removes the idea that we wait for the right time. It establishes that the conditions will never be perfect. Healing does not begin when it is comfortable. It begins when we decide to stop carrying what has already cost too much.

That is why the day endures.

Across Bermuda, from St George’s to Somerset, people gather in a shared moment that predates division and requires no agreement. It belongs to everyone. It asks nothing of any side. And yet, it quietly holds the very thing the country has not yet completed: taking the opportunity to heal.

This generation is not being asked to start over. It is being asked to finish. The fractures were exposed decades ago. The country responded by building unity in visible ways. What remains is the step that cannot be substituted, the truth that is acknowledged and the harm that is released so healing can take place.

Not rhetorically. Not symbolically. But in a way that allows the country to move forward without carrying the same weight.

So the question is no longer abstract. Bermuda can attempt to move forward while carrying what has never been healed. Or it can choose to release it and finally allow healing to begin.

Desmond Tutu did not speak from theory when he said, “Without forgiveness there is no future” for South Africa. He spoke from the work; from a country that had to decide, in real time, whether it would carry its wounds forward or lay them down. His conclusion was unambiguous.

Bermuda does not need to borrow another country's process. But it cannot escape the same truth. The future this island has long imagined: prosperous, cohesive and at peace with itself, is not withheld. It is waiting. And it will remain waiting until the work of forgiveness is done.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” – Romans 12:19

• Eugene Dean is leader of the The Emperial Group.