Posted Tuesday 1 April 2008
In recent years I have taken again to reading works of history, among them Anthony Beevor’s astonishing books on the battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43 and the fall of Berlin in 1945, writes the Very Rev Dr Gregor Duncan, Dean, and Rector of St Ninians, Pollokshields. Grim but gripping.
What struck me most was the utter disregard for human life on both sides and in both campaigns – huge numbers of innocent people were annihilated and, while they waited for their fate, lived in unspeakable conditions of cold, starvation and cruelty.
A whole German army was abandoned to its fate by its Führer, and Stalin’s NKVD dispatched many of his own men for the mere misfortune of having been captured by the enemy. Appalling. Merciless.
What human rule, authority, power and dominion can do by way of destruction and pitiless slaughter. (And one could say pretty much the same about the carpet bombing of German cities and towns: I cannot visit Germany, as I often do, and not feel ashamed.)
Beevor writes of a Roman Catholic chaplain in the German forces at Stalingrad who earned the nickname of ‘Death king of Gumrak’ because he was giving extreme unction to over 200 men a day.
Can you imagine? Yet this very terrible statistic surely speaks of the light that even the deepest human darkness cannot extinguish, the light of which the Feast of the Ascension speaks.
The nickname, though entirely understandable, isn’t true.
That priest was the servant of the King of life, not of Death – Hitler and Stalin were kings of death, but not Christ and his servant. The priest was, in the only way given to him, commending the dead and dying to the One who transcends Hitler, Stalin and all the mayhem their dominion, rule and authority created.
He knew that hope to which we are all called, the vision of human life in its rightful place, right in the midst of the divine, where the Ascended Christ has taken it.
If he had not known that hope and committed himself to it he would have left the dead to their own devices.
The hope to which we are called is human life flourishing in the fullest communion with God, as it did and does in the Ascended Christ, the Son of God.
That’s the ground of our commitment now to the worth and preciousness of every human being, called to such a transcendent destiny, a destiny and a worth which so many human systems of power and dominion utterly scorn.
Funny how something – the Ascension of Jesus – that at first sight seems so esoteric, so embarrassingly unconnected with ordinary reality, can actually be understood to be of the most immediate relevance. Stalin and Hitler have plenty of successors alive and wreaking havoc today. But so does that priest in the countless people who live and act according to the hope of which our world still stands in need: the vision of human life in its rightful place, right in the midst of God.
Category: Thought for the Month
