~ Robert KrulwichHere is life. Life, we’re told, is precious. Life is dust touched by the breath of God, or life is chemicals that somehow know how to attach to eachother — chemicals that link and bond and split and bind and become a jellyfish pulsing in the sea, a butterfly flittering in a forest, the shy gaze of a foxpup ready to play. It can form the glance of a boy carrying wood who asks his father “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” To take that boy, to extinguish that life, that breath, you would think would wound the universe — pain the creator.
We know this pain. I think of Abraham Lincoln down at the war office in Washington DC checking telegrams from the front reading the names of casualties, sometimes known to him, of people who had been killed or wounded. A newspaper correspondent saw President Lincoln there, watched him, reading the list as he wrote “with bowed head, and tears rolling down his furrowed cheeks, his face pale and wan, his heart heaving from emotion. And when the President walked out of the building he was in such a daze that he almost fell as he stepped into the street.”
A good man knows the weight of hurt when someone dies. Abraham Lincoln sent other people’s children to kill and to die, and when they died he shared their hurt. And this image, the image of Lincoln in anguish, is our image of a good man. That’s what we admire — to have a heart big enough to feel another’s troubles. To sigh with others, to cry with others, to join their suffering. Or, in different circumstances, when the occasion is right, to laugh with them — to share their joy — and every so often to love them. That’s the best of all — to step out of our lonely selves, however briefly, as the poet Paul Celan has written: “at times when only the void stood between us, to get all the way to eachother.”
