This morning, the little lone cherry tree outside the library is blooming, and the purple and gold crocuses down by the nursing building have just poked their glossy heads up into the world. I pried open my window early this morning to listen to a northern mockingbird warming up for the day, its voice ricocheting off the raindrops and the dripping branches of rain-blackened trees.
Spring has sprung, so it goes.
This morning, students with masks and screwdrivers are stuffing Molotov cocktails to be sent splattering on armored tanks, and fire is seething through the twisted rebar intestines of Soviet-style cement apartment buildings. Parking garages serve as the grand halls and corridors of the lost, the broken, the breaking. The voice of a friend, a poet, sobbing through an email that her city has been bombed.
War has begun, so it goes.
It is perhaps one of the cruelties of this life that the beautiful and the terrible are so inseparable. If we could truly live life in waves, riding to the top of a swell of water before plunging into a valley, we could rest. But with the terrible always comes some beautiful, sometimes relieving, sometimes mocking, like carnival music at a funeral.
It is said that we ought to mourn with those who mourn or to rejoice with those who rejoice. But when nature rejoices while its steward mourns, what then? When brothers and sisters across the world are on their knees, hands clasped in prayer or clasped in handcuffs, yet I am on my knees in soft, dark earth, hands dipped in exuberant daffodils and thriving weeds, what then?
Peace I leave with you, He said. My peace I give to you. Peace you were given — not complacency. Complacency is something stolen, illicitly smuggled. It is something we have no right to keep written on our wrists and foreheads like the mechanism for some glowing blue force-field, a portable “hedge of protection” that keeps us from feeling the saliva spray from the shouts of Russian protesters and Ukrainian civilians.
Prayer is action. And it is not the only action. When we ask that the hand of God be moved, we often forget who it is that serves as the hands and feet of God, the body of Christ. “Thy will be done,” we pray, but who is it that does the will of God?
When we are torn between two worlds, one of joy and one of pain, the answer is not to step out of one and into the other. It takes courage to live in both, to keep our eyes open to this beautiful and self-destructing planet. For only in this dark dynamism, the tension of beauty and ugliness, peace, not complacency, is able to take root and poke its glossy head up into the world, producing the powerful work of God.
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” -Elie Wiesel in “U.S. News and World Report,” October 27, 1986.
