The war is raging. Blood flows. Misfortune, suffering, death fall on the innocent and devour him alive. Tears, screams, bombs, machine guns. Pile of ruins. Desolation. It is the outrageous power of the strong. Their acquired rights, arrogated from time immemorial to make bodies bend, to humiliate, to oppress, to grind life to extract their power, their wealth, the material of their glory. Such is the repugnant justice of the world. That of the strong. And meanwhile, stepping aside, the rivals calculate their luck, or wait their turn to enter the macabre dance and collect their due.
The do-gooders, on the other hand, wash their hands in the blood of the victims: sometimes by covering the cries of applause, by saluting, with tears in their eyes, the courage of those sentenced to death, or by a simple shrug shoulders: “After all, isn’t that their destiny? »
The grim spectacle of Ukraine afflicts us. However, the same is going on in Yemen, in Palestine, in Sudan, in Burma, in so many other countries. Could it be because this time we are in the front row, and the faces of the dead, and of the men, women and children who mourn them, seem very close to us, and resemble us? What does it matter if emotion has the virtue of enlarging the heart.
The philosopher Jan Patocka said of our time, with that lucidity which is “the wound closest to the sun” (René Char), that peace has become there “an integral part of war”; an odious cemetery peace, with its common variations: the power of money, the stock market speculation of hunger, the sickening plunder of the Earth… comfort and indifference.
It costs to feel the abyss under our feet, the bottomless misfortune of the multitudes sacrificed on the altar of the order of the feds. To turn one’s gaze on the slumped by the side of the road, the exhausted from so much crying in vain, the desperate from the endless tunnels, and on the Earth, our mother, who groans. In addition to our propensity to dodge the human question, a whole sophisticated media arsenal protects us from it, by stuffing ourselves with analgesic words, such as democracy, freedom, prosperity, to mask the smell of mass graves so far away, so close; especially not to feel shame and unhappiness. Footsteps of boots on our soul.
And Easter in this setting
Treasure of humanity like so many hidden in the past, religions, myths, poetry and art, Easter – an unheard-of song in the night of the world – presents itself today as invigorating water and a purifying fire to those who want to pose and maintain their bewildered gaze on reality, and assume the pain and disarray before the dark horizon of our time.
God is dead, Easter reminds us, and with him his omnipotence in the image of the powerful and the idols who enthrone and who submit — at the antipodes of the fragility of life and beings. He is now one with the cry of the Earth, of the mutilated creation and of the endless cohort of its damned, sharing their relentless fate. Do not look for it elsewhere than among the less than nothing, the dispossessed of the earth, the multitudes crushed by violence, war, misery, misfortune and the bloody wheel of History as written by the victors – all these disposable and redeemable “things” which the masters dispose of as they please. Objects, at best, of charity and alms. An old Jewish tradition speaks of a suffering messiah, a mangy beggar sitting at the gate of the city — and of the heart. He expects those who hope to fight for justice and peace, to act with compassion and tenderness.
Such a helpless God is useless, some will say, as others laugh at a dead God. The same could be said of beauty and yet it is so precious and striking. It is a tiny weight in existence, but capable of tipping it into attention to the world and to others — to this lying on the side of the road, from the Gospel parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10, 25- 37), the one from which men outrageously turn away from God and from power, their God and their power making them blind and deaf to suffering.
But whoever, on the contrary, welcomes his own vulnerability, which surfaces in him, in her — a wound which connects to the whole universe and to God, as Simone Weil would say — can feel, as with the end of a blind man’s stick, to take back its image, the elusive that gives meaning. And the moral, political and metaphysical obligation, unconditional, as Simone Weil would say, to provide for the vital needs of the soul as well as the body.
The feast of Easter, in any case, invites it, which addresses the source of life buried in each of us, atheists and believers. It sounds like chains breaking. Like a gush of living water that strips and bares. Animates the anonymous community of the tried, the weakened, the shaken, who know what it costs to live, the price of grace. And urges to ax the crosses erected on the Golgothas of the world, so that never again… Will we consent?