We are in a half-forgotten war cemetery deep in central Germany, searching for the grave of a young boy who died in one of the last battles around Berlin at the end of the Second World War. He was fifteen when he was killed by a Soviet tank. He was trying to defend his homeland with a stick.
We find his grave, stark and silent among many thousands more – and bare, except for one small detail. A tiny sky-blue egg has fallen from a bird’s nest in an overhanging branch. The shell lies there, still unbroken, perfect, yet robbed of its chance of life, on the grave – the shell of a bird that will never sing, never fly, never become what God has dreamed it might be. And I weep for the boy who will never grow up. A unique and indispensable part of God’s Dream lies in the earth, beneath that broken shell. And our inhumanity has callously dispensed with it.
I think of the millions who now lie in cold graves throughout the world because they were dispatched to the killing fields. Every one of them has a story. Every one of them is priceless in God’s eyes. We remember them each autumn, in sorrow and in shame as well as with the pride and reverence they deserve. And we remember not only those who died, but those who must continue living, carrying the trauma of war and violence in their bodies, minds, and souls. Their stories have been disfigured brutally by the kind of experience no human should ever know.
When we align ourselves with violence, we rob life of its potential to come to birth. We abort part of God’s Dream.
Yet God’s Dream is greater than anything we can do in opposition to it. God’s light has pierced the darkness and the darkness has not extinguished it. How does this make any sense under the shadow of our warmongering, and under the cloud of all our loss and grieving? What hope might there be for kindling light rather than extinguishing it?
Source: Compass Points: Meeting God Every Day at Every Turn, pp.59-60.
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