There is a strange desire among humans to hear the voice of
God speak clearly and with great power.
Television evangelists tell us all the time that God is condemning
humanity for one fault or another. We
love abortion, homosexuality, etc, they say, and God visits us constantly with
terrible storms, earthquakes or wars to punish us for our terrible sins. I think if that were really the case, that
the world would have been destroyed long, long ago. We have come through massive, horrible
experiences and have continued to live our lives. I know that God’s love speaks more loudly
than the devastation; and the hope that remains after destruction is greater
than the incredible damage that we so frequently see around us.
I know that
God is a loving, forgiving God, who accepts humanity as belonging to him,
faults and all and has worked constantly to redeem us from the things that
plague us. I don’t want to excuse our
faults, but they pale in the light of the goodness that has also been created
by human works and care. Think of the
way that we seem to come together to help storm victims and counsel those who
have experienced tragedy. We do that
well, and I believe that is a God given virtue of humanity.
I love Dylan
Thomas’ poetry. He captures the essence
of life and doesn’t dismiss death by any measure. In his elegy to his father, he fairly yells
at him to “Go Not Gently into That Good Night”, and he speaks of a burned baby
and its mother, also burned and dead in his marvelous poem “Ceremony after a
Fire Raid” with great grief and yet with hope.
Thomas has always spoken to me of life and what it means. His own life was a mess. He was alcoholic and had titanic fights with
his wife Caitlyn, but yet taught us all about the power of life and death.
I can hardly
grasp what it meant to walk down the burned out streets of London after a Nazi
fire raid and to see the burned corpses piled up on one another, or to think of
the chaos after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 with the desperate
people jumping to their death from awesome heights. Thomas helps me with this by not dismissing
death at all, but including it as a natural part of life. When I watched the motion picture Titanic I was horrified by the loss of
life and the destruction of so much. When Leonardo Decaprio’s character slipped
beneath the waves, we all cried, but when his love, the now ancient Rose years later
dropped the incredibly valuable gem Star of the Sea into the ocean in memory of
him, we saw hope emerge from the darkness of the water. I am reminded in Thomas’ poetry of the hope
that resides in all of us, even after tragedies.
I know that
our soldiers come back from battles in Iraq or Afghanistan with unseen trauma
that shows up as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and plagues them in their
attempts to reconstruct their lives.
Hopefully, we are creating ways to counsel and help these good people so
that their lives can be put back together and resumed with some measure of
hope. It is never easy to do any of
this. It requires people who have strong
faith and commitment to each other to overcome the problems that arise. And it also requires a loving God who gives us
all the faith and hope to do what is necessary in this life to get us through
to the next one.
Walt
Whitman, in his poem Assurances gives
us a measure of what life and death means:
I do not doubt that the passionately-wept
deaths of young men are
provided for, and that the deaths of young
women and the deaths of
little children are provided for,
(Did you think Life was
so well provided for, and Death the purport
of all life is not well provided for?)
I do not doubt that
wrecks at sea, no matter what the horrors of them,
no matter whose wife, child, husband,
father, lover, has gone
down are provided for, to the minutest
points,
I do not doubt that
whatever can possibly happen anywhere at any
time, is
provided for in the inherences of things,
I
do not think Life provides for all and for Time and Space, but I
believe
Heavenly Death provides for all.
thanks again rodge!
ReplyDeleteavanza