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EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 19 |
October 1999 |
IN THAT
DARKEST PLACE
Father John Michael
Hanvey works with our organisation.
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp,
which turned my life into long night, seven times cursed and seven
times sealed. Never can I forget those flames that consumed my faith
forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me
for all eternity, of the desire to live.-Elie Wiesel
Wiesel was only a young boy when he and
his family were sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His whole family was
murdered in these death camps. He survived. This childhood experience
of inhumanity led him on to became one of the most profound spiritual
writers of our time, an age where humanity can still regress into the
most terrible violence, repression and racism.
Even though as adult human beings we must take responsibility for
our actions, many of our experiences have been done to us.
Children who are not nurtured, and suffer abandonment in so many
different ways, abuse, loneliness and general dysfunction, experience
the most incredible pain and problems. To see antithesis of this in
loving open interrelated families, in contact with the world and
society is a wonderful experience and there are many families like
this. But the self made prisons, where families close in on themselves
and hide so many secrets and lies, prepare the soil of the human
spirit for many destructive influences, addiction, repression and
co-dependant relationships.
When Elie Wiesel experienced an execution by hanging of some
Jewish men in the concentration camp, an example because of an
attempted escape, he observed that the youngest of them could have
been no more than fourteen. His body was so emaciated that when the
block he was standing on was kicked away, it took the boy fifteen
minutes or more to die. They were all forced to watch. Wiesel heard a
fellow Jew in the crowd say where is God now? and Wiesel
experienced almost an automatic answer in his own soul, He is
there hanging on the gallows.
The reality of the Gospel leads us to face our own private hells
and prisons, and other peoples as well. No one is unredeemable or
unlovable or beyond help. Our God has already descended into Hell.
Maybe many of us like Wiesel will have to wrestle like Jacob did with
the angel of darkness and despair, and maybe, like Jacob, at the end
of the wrestling we will see the face of God. Of course when we are in
the middle of the pain and negativity and the hell, spiritual and
religious feelings are not really an option, we are fighting for our
very lives. It is always the dark veil of faith at the end of the day.
The long apparent silences of God, and sometimes the absence of that
love we all need, from people we rightly expect it from, can make the
pain almost unbearable. But equally, so often the divine love we so
crave for, comes from unexpected places and from unexpected people. At
the foot of our own crosses there might be many Mary Magdalenes, and
young disciples with little experience who are there just for us.
There is no logic about where the love comes from, just as there is no
place so dark that He cannot be found.
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