Saturday Snippet

Every Saturday, I usually post a snippet from a book I’m writing, or a book I’ve recently read that appealed to me.  However, this morning I’d like to do something different.

Last Wednesday, March 2nd, was Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting and repentance marking the first day of the season of Lent for many Christian denominations.  The liturgy of the day is designed to help Christians remember their sins, repent of them, and seek forgiveness, and sets the tone for the penitential season of Lent over the next six weeks.

At this time in 2022, with the Ukraine war raging on unabated, bitter internal divisions so great as to threaten to tear our own country apart, and international tensions at fever pitch, I think it’s particularly important for Christians to recognize the Biblical teaching that sin is at the root of all human failures, personal and collective.  Those of my readers who aren’t Christian will doubtless snort in derision, but the concept is fundamental to understanding the doctrine of redemption from sin, both corporate and personal – something I hope and pray for daily.

This year, Gerard Vanderleun’s meditation on Ash Wednesday struck me very powerfully.  Here’s how it begins.  The poetry excerpts are taken from T. S. Eliot‘s well-known poem, “Ash Wednesday“.

Being only a man, I often tire of the things of man; of his bottomless vanity and his endless violence which, as all the things of men must, resides in me as well as in you.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us.

Many years ago, I was browsing through a newsmagazine and came upon a photograph of the machete-hacked corpse of an African child floating like some half-chewed chunk of jetsam in a backwater of Lake Victoria. This was during what we now think of, because we have to think of it as something distinct from our normal run-of-the-mill massacres, as the Rwandan genocide.

It was a crystal clear photograph showcasing an act of genocide like any other, only the meaningless details changed: children, machetes, an African lake. As a professional in the pornography of violence, the photographer had gotten in close. The child’s eyes could be seen. They were without pupils, the irises congealed into a dead fish-belly white; the white of clotted milk. The photographer had done his job well. The smell of it came off the page….

Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.

I thought then, looking at the eyes in the face of the ruined child in that photograph, that if that child’s eyes could reflect anything they would reflect everything — every thing — we are.

There’s more at the link.

That image struck me very powerfully, because I’ve traveled in that area and seen much the same thing.  It’s as old as the hills in that part of the world.  Human life is very cheap in much of Africa.  It always has been, and it still is.  Whether that will ever change is open to question.

This weekend, as the season of Lent gets under way, I’d like to suggest that you read two things:  Mr. Vanderleun’s thoughts on Ash Wednesday, and T. S. Eliot’s poem about it.  Both offer much food for thought, and are probably more appropriate to this season of war, disruption and chaos than anything else I could find for today’s Snippet.

Peter