On a sunny July afternoon, sitting under a plum tree, in a cottage garden near Goatland, Yorkshire, I was reading the first volume of an autobiography. A few yards away at the bottom of the garden, the stream chuckled and murmured, the small bird population was out and about, and it was a good day to be on holiday. Across the stream, the old railway line on which the steam train still ran twice a day, and a hundred yards away the railway bridge, its arches blackened by smoke, through which the train appeared still puffing out the smoke that immediately sent me back to a childhood in Ayrshire beside the main New Cumnock - Dumfries line.
That afternoon, in good time, the train could be heard chugging its way along the valley, and as it approached the bridge the whistle sounded. It was a moment of epiphany for me, a coincidence of sound, smell and sight which transformed what I was reading into words that became eerie and frightening, and resonant with a solemn awareness of life's ambiguity and tragedy I have hardly ever felt, before or since.
I was reading Elie Wiesel's newly published autobiography, All Rivers Rune to the Sea. I was reading, at the precise time the Yorkshire steam train approached the bridge, the paragraphs in which he recalls as a teenager, the sound of the train engines chugging, the whistles screaming, the clanking of the wagons, as trains left for Auschwitz. In Yorkshire, on holiday in sunshine,the picturesque reminded of the grotesque 60 years earlier in Poland. And did so with such force the memory remains vivid. That coincidence of my life with what I was reading of another's life, is fixed as one of those moments in life when truth penetrates well below the radar of rational control, and we are bereft of explanation. There is a mystery of human connectedness that just is, and we are not wrong in sensing the need for humility, and the risk that we stand on the brink of what is holy.
In perhaps the most famous words Wiesel has written, seared in the minds of those who read them first in Night, Wiesel stated with adamantine intent, his life's work:
"Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
Holocaust Remembrance Day is as important as any other day in the Christian Calendar. It is a day to remember human capacity for evil, and for good. But actually, Wiesel does not see these two as the ultimate polarity. His experiences at Auschwitz showed him something much more sinister and corrosive of humanity, something that can ignore cruelty, smother compassion, approve atrocity, silence conscience, even re-set conscience to a default setting of complacency - he called it indifference.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
To play Mozart as the welcoming music at Auschwitz is a grotesque example of such indifference. At the heart of Christian civilisation mechanised murder was made possible, and human worth and value neutralised by ideology, and indifference to human consequences. This should never be forgotten. Wiesel is right, and has the right, in my view the absolute right, to require of the Christian church, a willingness to remember, to repent, and never to forget the consequences of a Christian theology laced with the toxins of anti-semitic rhetoric, co-opted by a state church in thrall to the political power brokers. Such thralldom is as far removed from the New Testament truth of the crucified Jewish Jesus, and the New Testament visions of the Church as the Body of Christ, as can be conceived by minds indifferent (Wiesel's word) to the message of reconciliation in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, and the realiry of the Messiah in whom the two become one.
The last words are from Elie Wiesel.
For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.
“This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.”
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/eliewiesel117181.html#SxrM02gQIdsIUycw.99
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/eliewiesel117181.html#SxrM02gQIdsIUycw.99
Comments