It’s late spring and the leaves of poplars are deepening from lime-green to mint. I am on my tricycle in the shallow depression between the house and the barn, watching my brothers and sister and our cousins play hide-and-seek.
It’s early evening and the farm has settled down, by which I mean the cows are in the pasture and the black dog is sleeping under the porch and the red barn and white tractor and fenced yard with a meadowlark on the gate post has set me in the middle of a shimmering land full of wondrous secrets.
In growing twilight I watch human silhouettes stalk, crawl, creep, then suddenly I hear racing feet and shrieks of laughter. I grip the handlebars of my tricycle until the moon burns itself into the long grass and the rust-tinged machinery turns silver and a voice calls me inside.
Fifty years later I am in Japan with my eldest son. It’s Easter. The cherry blossom festivals have ended and we have come to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Behind a glass panel is the heat-withered remnant of a tricycle, and above, I see pictures of children resembling fallen silhouettes.
~
And here we are again in the middle of Passion Week, also known as Holy Week, in a world still ruled by lust for dominance. (Half-consciously maintained by a feudal wrath-appeasing-blood-payment myth, leveraged as licence to act upon our own wrath and call it God, while blinding us to an ocean of love that longs to heal our hearts.)
One day, if Easter is true, we will all start crying — unable to stop until our fearful, envious, resentful, rapacious, hiroshima-hearts have broken open; until the poplars green and the moon and meadowlark begin to sing and we are at peace, sitting together on the porch steps of sunrise.
A beautiful dream (on Jamie’s birthday)
Thank you adela and Happy Birthday Jamie!
My mind cannot grasp what even all hearts cannot feel, enough sadness, remorse for war crimes and other murders to test the equipment. Good Friday sparks our humility if we remember what we did and Sunday if we realize all God has done.
Thanks for this Gordon.
Made me weep.
Thank you Joyce.
This was very touching Steve. I’m looking forward to our hearts being broken open and sitting in peace together on the porch steps of sunrise. Thank you for these words! ?
Thank you so much Grace. (I am too.)
Thanks, Steve – enjoyed the memory of the farm.
And, thanks for this (I think) “(Half-consciously maintained by a feudal wrath-appeasing-blood-payment myth, leveraged as license to act upon our own wrath and call it God, while blinding us to an ocean of love that longs to heal our hearts.) I’m working at coming to full consciousness…. I can understand how the ocean of love can be obscured by wrath…
but … how does one experience the tricycle in Hiroshima without wrath?
Thanks Sam. My own experience there was deep sadness. But anger would not have been out of place, the kind of anger, hopefully, that is fully conscious of both the criminal act and our own complicity. Not the retributive wrath that is labelled by the machines of war as redemptive, which keeps alive nationalism, the corporate coup d’etat and the whole military industrial complex, ensuring ongoing ‘hiroshimas’…this deserves anger and exposure and of course self-examination.
Thanks, Steve – of course. I tell angry clients that anger is a secondary emotion, but it often obscures the primary one. Sadness is the primary emotion, the recovery of which promises a road to healing.