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The Passion of Christ's Followers And Their Special Perspective
Posted by Pile
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[Sociology] |
 On this Easter day, when many are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, we've got an insightful article about passion and redemption from the Independent in the U.K. Well worth a read. |
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"About suffering," Auden famously wrote in 1938, "they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ its human position; how it takes place/ While someone is eating or opening a window/Or just walking dully along." Yet the great crucifixion paintings of Caravaggio or Bellini, or Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican - though they were not what Auden had in mind - have God on their side. We may feel the power of suffering in the context of religion but, outside this spiritual setting, I’m not sure how compassionate we really are.
The atrocities of yesterday - the Beslan school massacre, the Bali bombings, the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, the gassings of Halabja - can still fill us with horror and pity, although that sensitivity is heavily conditioned by the nature of the perpetrators. In an age where war has become a policy option rather than a last resort, where its legitimacy rather than its morality can be summed up on a sheet of A4 paper, we prefer to concentrate on the suffering caused by "them" rather than "us".
Hence the tens of thousands of Iraqis who were killed in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation, the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam war, the hundreds of Egyptians cut down by our 1956 invasion of Suez are not part of our burden of guilt. About 1,700 Palestinian civilians from the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps - equal to more than half the dead of the World Trade Center - were massacred in Lebanon.
But how many readers can remember the exact date? September 16-18, 1982. "Our" dates are thus sacrosanct, "theirs" are not; though I notice how "they" must learn "ours". How many times are Arabs pointedly asked for their reaction to 11 September 2001, with the specific purpose of discovering whether they show the correct degree of shock and horror? And how many Westerners would even know what happened in 1982?
It’s also about living memory - and also, I suspect, about photographic records. The catastrophes of our generation, or of our parents’ or even our grandparents’ generation - have a poignancy that earlier bloodbaths do not. Hence we can be moved to tears by the epic tragedy of the Second World War and its 55 million dead, by the murder of six million Jews, by our families’ memories of this conflict - a cousin on my father’s side died on the Burma Road - and also by the poets of the First World War. Owen and Sassoon created the ever-living verbal museum of that conflict. |
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