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) 

The world at this moment is looking towards Europe with a broken heart

But Jesus said to him, “Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matt. 26:52)

“Hullo, my relatives.” (Native American greeting)

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” (Letter to Everett “Swede” Hazlett, July 22,1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower)

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.” (Once There Was A War, 1958, John Steinbeck)

“The cocks don’t crow to wake the morning, [t]here’s not as yet a sound of man, [t]he owls in glades call out their warnings, [a]nd ash trees creak and creak again." (Taras Shevchenko)

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Banksys-Armoured-Dove-of-Peace-on-the-side-of-a-Palestinian-house-near-to-the_fig1_319293800

The world at this moment is looking towards Europe with a broken heart, and those among us, that are compelled to prayer, send supplications to the Creator that a benevolent intercession may quickly put an end to this war which has broken out in the Ukraine. May it be the brave Ukrainian people survive and endure best they can and that the Russian political leaders come swiftly to their right senses. Howard Zinn, the American World War II veteran, philosopher and historian, expressed the awfulness of war with powerful comprehension as to its ultimate cost: “[t]here is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” We are all members of humanity, “consideration of others” and  “philanthropy”,[1] the defining characteristic of this universal body of ‘blood-beat’. And unpalatable as this might sometimes seem to us, that we are ‘tied to the hip’ regardless of our nationalistic or eschatological predispositions, this world is all we have. Our one and only opportunity to live out the meaningfulness of “compassion”, that is, to suffer together with our neighbour. To make our life, and the lives of those around us, the best they could possibly be. All else, however spectacular or mesmerizing it might very well be, like flying rockets to Mars and the like, is at best but a welcome bonus. At worst little more than a distraction, a bug about the ears, to the plaintive cries of all those who are needlessly maimed and killed in theatres of ruinous conflict across the world. The only real winner is the military-industrial complex and the defence industries which drive it. As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom has said: “[t]here is no idol that doesn’t claim blood.” [2] The sad truth that throughout the history of the human race, it has been much easier to find the devil in ourselves, and even easier still to point him out in others, than to genuinely seek after the Creator, or the ‘Form of the Good’, in our own hearts. And, yet, I must confess, there are hours when it could be hard to know the difference, like discerning what stands behind the shadow of a shape caught between the rays of light and the cold ground.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/humanity

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2OtD5OkHHo