Ash Wednesday: Dom Brendan
Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2006
Last month on January 27th the world observed the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the soviet army. In the years since that event took place there have been countless books, newspaper articles and even some movies that attempted to describe or explain the meaning of the Holocaust.
One of those camps, Auschwitz was in fact two death camps. An earlier one where thousands of poles, jews and gypsies were put to death. Among them St. Maximillian Kolbe starved to death in the basement of the punishment block 11. To get there you have to walk down a long corridor lined with the prison photographs of polish intellectuals and students, some of them just boys. All of them perished in the camp. At this point the guides tell you that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz was 6 months.
Auschwitz II was the larger camp just 2 kilometers away. Nothing can really prepare you for the size of the place: the double row of electrified barbed wire fences, the watch towers, and the long rows of barracks.
In the center of the camp are two rail lines with a wide gravel walkway on either side for disembarkement. It was here that the train journeys for Jewish deportees and other minorities finally ended. In the summer of 1944 hundreds of trains arrived with their cargo of 250,000 Hungarian Jews who, within a few hours after their arrival, had been herded into the gas chambers and from there into the crematoria. Death organized on a factory scale.
All but one of the gas chambers and all the crematoria were blown up the Nazi’s in the days before the liberation. They lie at the back of the camp near a grove of poplars: huge piles of rubble left undisturbed as a silent witness. Just to the right of them is a pond filled with murky water. It was here that the ashes of the dead were dumped.
Looking into that pond you see not merely the ashes of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and others. You see also the ashes of what might have been, the shattered hopes and dreams of modern civilization.
The Nazi death camps of World War II, like the camps of the Soviet Gulags, and the re-indoctrination camps of Mao’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam are all a testimony to the fact that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. Something that is far more than mere badness, far more than mere selfishness, something that is in fact evil. Were it simply a matter of ignorance or human stupidity we could say that what the human race needed was higher education, a masters in compassion or a PhD in human kindness. But it fact no amount of education, no amount of reading and study can change the fact that you and I sin even willingly and eagerly.
The journey that led to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and a hundred other camps all began with a single human will to do wrong. And there is not a single person here tonight who does not know what that feels like if we allow ourselves to get beyond the usual excuses and the pop-psychology jargon we use to justify ourselves to ourselves.
I just said that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. But this is not how we started out. On Holy Saturday Night at the Great Vigil of Easter we will hear how God created us good in the beginning, and how he as worked all through human history to call us back to our original innocence. Ashes to ashes is what we will become but God has greater plans in store for you and I. What he asks is our cooperation. And the first step in that cooperation is the grace of repentance, the desire to turn from sin and to seek forgiveness and renewal.
The ashes of Auschwitz are a sober reminder of what happens to a world without God, a world without love and without repentance. The ashes that we bless and distribute here tonight are not a sign of hopelessness and despair but the joyful acceptance of God’s offer of salvation.
March 1, 2006
Last month on January 27th the world observed the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the soviet army. In the years since that event took place there have been countless books, newspaper articles and even some movies that attempted to describe or explain the meaning of the Holocaust.
One of those camps, Auschwitz was in fact two death camps. An earlier one where thousands of poles, jews and gypsies were put to death. Among them St. Maximillian Kolbe starved to death in the basement of the punishment block 11. To get there you have to walk down a long corridor lined with the prison photographs of polish intellectuals and students, some of them just boys. All of them perished in the camp. At this point the guides tell you that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz was 6 months.
Auschwitz II was the larger camp just 2 kilometers away. Nothing can really prepare you for the size of the place: the double row of electrified barbed wire fences, the watch towers, and the long rows of barracks.
In the center of the camp are two rail lines with a wide gravel walkway on either side for disembarkement. It was here that the train journeys for Jewish deportees and other minorities finally ended. In the summer of 1944 hundreds of trains arrived with their cargo of 250,000 Hungarian Jews who, within a few hours after their arrival, had been herded into the gas chambers and from there into the crematoria. Death organized on a factory scale.
All but one of the gas chambers and all the crematoria were blown up the Nazi’s in the days before the liberation. They lie at the back of the camp near a grove of poplars: huge piles of rubble left undisturbed as a silent witness. Just to the right of them is a pond filled with murky water. It was here that the ashes of the dead were dumped.
Looking into that pond you see not merely the ashes of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and others. You see also the ashes of what might have been, the shattered hopes and dreams of modern civilization.
The Nazi death camps of World War II, like the camps of the Soviet Gulags, and the re-indoctrination camps of Mao’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam are all a testimony to the fact that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. Something that is far more than mere badness, far more than mere selfishness, something that is in fact evil. Were it simply a matter of ignorance or human stupidity we could say that what the human race needed was higher education, a masters in compassion or a PhD in human kindness. But it fact no amount of education, no amount of reading and study can change the fact that you and I sin even willingly and eagerly.
The journey that led to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and a hundred other camps all began with a single human will to do wrong. And there is not a single person here tonight who does not know what that feels like if we allow ourselves to get beyond the usual excuses and the pop-psychology jargon we use to justify ourselves to ourselves.
I just said that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. But this is not how we started out. On Holy Saturday Night at the Great Vigil of Easter we will hear how God created us good in the beginning, and how he as worked all through human history to call us back to our original innocence. Ashes to ashes is what we will become but God has greater plans in store for you and I. What he asks is our cooperation. And the first step in that cooperation is the grace of repentance, the desire to turn from sin and to seek forgiveness and renewal.
The ashes of Auschwitz are a sober reminder of what happens to a world without God, a world without love and without repentance. The ashes that we bless and distribute here tonight are not a sign of hopelessness and despair but the joyful acceptance of God’s offer of salvation.
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 2:02 PM
3 Comments:
An incredibly theologically dense and insightful homily on the nature of evil and grace. Was Dom Brendan a Lutheran at one time? He has the gospel down pat and he has a keen insight into human nature. I've been reading his writings over the years and think he should do a book or something. Maybe go on a kind of monastic tour speaking tour. Give us more!
Thank you for your interest! We will try to post our homilies as they are written. If you run out of material in our archives, you may enjoy a different sort of blog written by the same authors:
www.chicagomonk.blogspot.com.
Oh, and Dom Brendan, just for the sake of information, is a cradle Catholic. But we're both upper Midwesterners and so know a thing or two about Lutheranism!
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