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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. Material Copyright © 1999 THOMAS (Those on the Margins of a Society)
THOMAS is an integral part of Catholic Welfare Societies, Registered Charity number 503102