There is Prayer and there is Music

There are bottomless horrors in the world. This is a reality we cannot turn our eyes away from. No just theodicy, as it has been posited by our great spiritual thinkers, can ignore the “problem of evil.” It is not beauty which will save the world for sometimes there is no beauty to speak of (and it is only rarely I would dare disagree with Dostoevsky). But here I do. If the world is to be saved, it is not even through love in the first instance, for self-sacrificial love as history has indicated to us, is beyond the capacity of most human beings. If the world is to be saved at all, it will be as a result of compassion. That is, to suffer with the other. And this in itself is oftentimes hard enough, yet it is not an impossible grace. Dig deep enough, you will find it there, in the hearts of most people. Then there are those days when words alone cannot describe the overwhelming suffering and utter devastation we might witness during the course of our lives. Great writers and painters such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Primo Levi, and Francisco Goya, or Theodore Gericault, can come close to capturing and describing this anti-spirit of ruination. In simple terms, Nihilism. Things can be so enormously terrifying, particularly during times of war and violence, that the definition of humanity itself might take us into another anguish. During such hours it could seem we are awake to an unending nightmare or have been thrown into another reality of apocalyptic dimensions. During such times of great mourning and moral questioning, there is common prayer which belongs to every compassionate heart impossible to silence and there is music that can reach deep into the soul to remind us of our humanness:

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: “May those who love you be secure. May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels.” (Ps. 122:6-7)

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956)