The Fourteenth Station

One day I chanced to hear about an exhibit at a church I passed by regularly. It was titled "Migration: Stations of the Cross". The intersection of the "Stations of the Cross" and "Migration" resonated with my Catholic upbringing and my immigrant heritage. I had to check it out. Moreover, I lamented the President's harsh treatment of migrants and immigrants, I was hoping to understand these things in a new light.

I was on my way home from the office so I decided to stop by the church. It was a large building, so I asked a lady who happened to be standing in the hallway for directions to the exhibit, and she graciously pointed me in the right direction. I entered a large room that looked to be a meeting room, which was empty except for displays around the perimeter. Each display highlighted an aspect of human migration and matched it with Jesus' journey of suffering, the "Stations of the Cross". At the Fourteenth Station, where "Jesus Died", was a prayer written by a prisoner of the Ravensbrück concentration camp:

“Oh Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will. But do not remember only the suffering they have inflicted on us; remember too the fruits we brought forth thanks to this suffering-our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all of this. And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”

I read it and I remained there, transfixed. Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought about the context in which these words were written, a concentration camp. The summation of every evil humanity was capable of was distilled in that one place. How someone subjected to cruelties of that space could pen such words and pray such a prayer was beyond me. It was akin to the words Jesus prayed when he was being crucified:

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." (Luke 23:34)

It seems only a saint or superhuman could utter a prayer like that. Or perhaps it is the quintessentially human thing to do. Only a human has the possibility of rising above the fight-or-flight response, the "lizard brain" if you will. It would seem the advice given to Job in his suffering, "curse God and die", is more along the lines of what we would expect in this situation.

Though I didn't fathom the depths of forgiveness required to pray a prayer like that, I knew I had read words of transformation. I feared losing these words, so  I took a picture with my phone. From time to time, I look at these words. It is my recurring devotional. It seems that if one could pray this prayer, even in the face of harsh realities and vicious evil, one could be healed of anger and bitterness.  However, this prayer also raises some hard questions.

Was this a prayer of reconciliation? Certainly. But reconciliation requires confession and mutual understanding. The perpetrator and the victim must face the truth together. But at moment this was written, the perpetrators were quite busy with their their murderous work, eliminating what they saw as sub-human vermin. The victims had no way of knowing if the cosmic scales of justice would ever be balanced.

Does this prayer give evil a pass because the victims forgave their tormentors? Even if that were so, does that balance the scales for all of humanity?

“When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity." Simon Wiesenthal

In passing judgement on all the perpetrators of the Nazi extermination program during the trials at Nuremberg and Jerusalem, humanity established that mass murder is evil and those who participate in it must be called to account. 

Nevertheless, we remain with the challenge and question of how to make sense, or better yet, meaning, out of the evils and tragedies of life that we have experienced personally. The challenge is to choose what our response will be:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. - Viktor Frankl

Ultimately, there are the questions of forgiveness and redemption. The author of the prayer chose to forgive and redeem. It was a response in the face of an evil that could not be undone:

“The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.” - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

If all the evil that was perpetrated and all the lives that were lost were to have any meaning, somehow it must all be redeemed from the past for the present and the future. For the past up to the present, all we can do is to come to terms with the evil done against us, by forgiving:

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past."  Gerald G. Jampolsky

Forgiveness is not passivity. Forgiveness is a response to the truth of evil and the harm it has done. It is also a decision not to let evil adhere to our souls.

For the future we must promise to respond to evil and not to passively look away. A promise not to forget how the evil took root and manifested itself. And a promise not to let it gain a foothold in the future. 

As Hannah Arendt points out, these acts of forgiveness and promise are meaningless in isolation. The commitment of forgiveness and the commitment of promise must be made in the presence of others. The fruits of forgiveness and promise can only take root in the fertile soil of community as it did that day in Ravensbrück.