The close-as-brothers relationship between Azim Khamisa and Ples Felix certainly exemplifies friendship as a kind of love. But it is an even more extraordinary example of forgiveness, compelling enough to be included in the PBS documentary “The Mystery of Love,” to be broadcast on Wednesday night.
“Mystery” serves up experts and ordinary people to investigate love’s varieties, and includes the story of how Mr. Felix’s grandson killed Mr. Khamisa’s only son. Afterward the men met and began teaching nonviolence as a way to redeem the tragedy, and their relationship deepened.
“The collective culture is competition, conflict and violence,” Joan Konner, the executive producer of “Mystery,” said in discussing why she turned her journalistic skills to a hardly neglected topic. A former dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Konner said she sought to encourage people to consider love as a tool to replenish a post-9/11 society that she said was focused on survival, and getting and spending.
“I hope that people become aware of the many deep connections and give them as much honor as they do the dominant stories in the culture, which are love and sex and religion,” Ms. Konner said in an interview about the program. Most often, the love stories we tell are about romance and sex, she said.
Given that even the oceans of wisdom from Shakespeare to Dr. Phil cannot unknot love’s challenges, “Mystery” introduces viewers to many types of love stories and many ideas about what it all means. The stories include those of an elderly, interracial couple in Indiana who live together platonically; a 30ish couple about to be wed; the seemingly odd-couple marriage of an opera singer and a hog farmer in Minnesota; a national group of motorcyclists who help abused children; three brothers in Baltimore who went to Iraq at the same time; and even a glimpse at connections among primates.
As host, the writer and actor Anna Deavere Smith brings together the stories, which are threaded with comments by people like the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., senior minister of the Riverside Church in Manhattan; James Hillman, a psychologist and author of “A Terrible Love of War”; and Dr. Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, where the chimps have their own love stories.
Ms. Konner, an award-winning television documentary producer, said she found no fewer than 1,000 current “experts” who have written about love. She discovered a handful of the show’s subjects through a professional choir called Conspirare, based in Austin, Tex., which is included as an example of communal love and whose orchestral and chamber music is featured throughout “Mystery.”
Ms. Smith was chosen as host, Ms. Konner said, as an alternative to hiring a glossy broadcast journalist who might not have had Ms. Smith’s intellectual bona fides. For her part, Ms. Smith said she was taken with the program’s presentation of love as a radical force, beyond the usual boy-girl fluff.
“I’m interested in connection,” said Ms. Smith, who teaches at New York University, in the Tisch School of the Arts and at the law school.
“On the one hand, the traditional family has fallen apart; it doesn’t exist like it did a generation ago,” Ms. Smith said. “On the other hand, we haven’t created a way for people to have intimacy outside of one-on-one relationships. We don’t have enough ways to care for each other; that’s the moment we’re living in. We need love to solve the problem of education, and I don’t know how we’re going to solve the health care problem without love.”
The major financing for “Mystery” came from the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Mich., a nonprofit foundation that, according to its literature, has a mission to foster the awareness of the power of love and forgiveness. Among other things, the foundation finances research on topics like altruism and compassion. It was endowed by John E. Fetzer, a pioneer in broadcasting and the former owner of the Detroit Tigers. Community groups in cities across the country, as part of an initiative financed by the Fetzer Institute, are convening with their group members and others to watch “Mystery” and talk about its ideas.
In Dayton, Ohio, for example, a group called Civic Life International is assembling a diverse group of 80 people to talk about love and race relationships. They will meet on Tuesday at the local PBS station to see two segments of “Mystery,” in advance of the national broadcast.
“When we talk about love, we don’t want to talk about it in isolation,” said Tokunbo Awoshakin, the executive director of Civic Life International, a group composed of journalists and professionals in conflict resolution who work to help African and minority communities. “How do you put love into action in a diverse community like Dayton, which is deeply segregated along lines of race and class?”
The story of Mr. Khamisa and Mr. Felix certainly happens along a few social fault lines. In San Diego in 1995, Tariq Khamisa, 20, was in a car delivering a pizza when Tony Hicks, Mr. Felix’s grandson, then a 14-year-old eighth grader, shot him to death. The teenager, who admitted the killing and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, was part of a gang that intended to rob Mr. Khamisa.
Mr. Khamisa, a devout Muslim, and Mr. Felix, who talks about society’s perception of his black grandson, now travel the country discussing forgiveness and the prevention of violence. In “Mystery” they tell their story to a group of elementary school students and ask how many would want revenge for Tariq’s death. Many hands shoot up.
“But let me ask you, would revenge bring Tariq back?” Mr. Khamisa asks.
Another provocative segment on the documentary, called “Love and War,” shows Mr. Hillman, the psychologist, theorizing about the brotherhood of the battlefield. Across cultures and across time a collective thrill runs through civilizations as they march off to face an enemy, Mr. Hillman said in an interview about his participation in the program. “How the hell do you account for the fact that we’ve been at war since human history began?” he said. “We must love it.”
“The love of war is a love, in war, of the men for each other,” Mr. Hillman says in “Mystery.” On a more mundane and upbeat note, “Mystery” takes us to the wedding of Mark Cravotta and Monica Proctor, musicians in Austin who met on the Internet and then grappled with preconceived notions of what a relationship should be. Ms. Proctor was wary that Mr. Cravotta was twice divorced and had a child. He realized that he had never really seen marriage as a lifetime commitment.
“We are in a position now where we definitely could get hurt,” Mr. Cravotta says in the show after he and his wife exchange vows. “And we’re in anyway. But that’s where the juicy stuff is.”
