A commemoration service was held in Tyne Cot war cemetery in Belgium to mark the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, which began on July 31st, 1917. When the battle ended three months later more than half a million men from both sides were injured or dead. An Irish Army officer took part, a generous tribute to the many young Irishmen who died there. The casualty figures represent individuals, husbands, sons, brothers, whose loss brought grief to those left behind. Letting go is never easy.
We saw this in the recent case of the infant Charlie Gard whose parents understandably found it hard to let their child go, challenging medical opinion that there was no prospect of recovery. Distinguishing between prolonging life and prolonging dying can be difficult; love sometimes demands hard decisions. They eventually agreed to let him die, saying that he would be with “the little angels.” Hopefully they have a faith to sustain them.
No comfort
What is said at sensitive times matters. A young woman gave up going to church the day her son was killed in a traffic accident. She found no comfort in the words of a priest who assured her he was safe in heaven. She didn’t want him in heaven; she wanted him in her arms, to see him grow up. She not only lost her son that day; she lost her faith.
Elie Wiesel, a Jewish teenager, lost his faith in Auschwitz when he witnessed the execution of a child by the Nazis. He describes the horror in his book Night. "Never shall I forget that night," he wrote, "the first night in the camp which has turned my life into one long night . . . Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I'm condemned to live as long as God himself. Never." For 10 years after the war, Wiesel refused to talk about his experiences but changed his mind after developing a friendship with French author and Nobel Laureate, François Mauriac who after an early meeting, compared Wiesel to "Lazarus risen from the dead", a prisoner of his past.
Mauriac, a devout Christian, who wondered how best to help his young friend, would later write: “And I, who believed that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanging child? What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli (Jesus), his brother, who may have resembled him – the crucified, whose cross has conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that the conformity between the cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.”
Behind the tears
Mauriac knew that when confronted with raw grief tears meant more than a thousand well-meaning platitudes.
But behind the tears stood his faith. Faith does not ease or diminish grief, it informs it. Christian faith is not mere speculation or human invention; it is a response to what God has promised in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Fr Henri Nouwen in Seeds of Hope explains: "The friends of Jesus saw him and heard him only a few times after that Easter morning, but their lives were completely changed. What seemed to be the end proved to be the beginning; what seemed to be a cause for fear proved to be a cause for courage; what seemed to be defeat proved to be victory; and what seemed to be the basis for despair proved to be the basis for hope."