In a stunning little book entitled, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, an anonymous collection of children’s drawings and poems emerge from a concentration camp as a testimony of resilience in times of adversity. Over 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942 and 1944. This camp was a way station to Auschwitz and other extermination camps.
Even in the midst of such pain and suffering the children were able to leave behind drawings and poems hidden in the barrack walls that reflected their creative imaginations and optimistic naïveté. Their drawings and poems, often anonymous, continue to speak as reminders of life and of hope.
“Hey, try to open up your heart to beauty.
Go to the woods someday and weave a wreath
of memory there. Then if tears obscure your way,
you’ll know how wonderful it is to be alive.”
Children often see things grownups cannot see. Amid the brutality and death that surrounded them, the remnants of their creative insights can spark an imaginative chord for all of us. Like the myth of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes, the ashes of these children long scattered in the fields of forgotten places of pain emerge like butterflies inviting us to reflect on how wonderful it is to be alive.
On this Third Sunday of Easter, the Christian Community continues to celebrate the extraordinary phenomenon of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Emerging from the sacredness of Holy Week, we have relived the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. Not without doubts and moments of uncertainty, the Church continues to search for hope in a world that reflects more violence than peace, more greed than gratitude and more injustice than compassionate care for one another. The challenge of the post resurrected Church is to create a commensurate feeling of hope amid the conflict and strife of factions within the Christian communities.
Searching for ecumenical signs of lasting unity remain elusive, but the challenge of Jesus’ command “to love one another” is reflective of hope and, with enough guilt, action. Finding ways to “open our hearts to beauty” and “to go to the woods someday” remain as an open invitation to the grace of our God and the possibility of weaving for ourselves wreaths of hope.
“He doesn’t know the world at all who stays in his nest and doesn’t go out,
he doesn’t know what the birds know best nor what I want to sing about,
that the world is full of loveliness.”
Opening our hearts to the gift of God’s grace demands that we surrender control and the need to create strategies of power. Trusting in God’s saving grace is the ultimate test of believing that Jesus really did rise from the dead and has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all people, no exceptions. Believing that the “World is full of loveliness” becomes an ongoing challenge when we are surrounded by cynical voices and self-defeating invitations. Believing that Heaven does exist bolsters our faith and diminishes our illusory thinking.
“I’d like to go away where there are other, nicer people. Somewhere into the far unknown, where no one kills another. Maybe more of us will reach this goal before too long.”
Our readings for the Third Sunday of Easter take on Pentecostal like fervor as we listen to Peter (Acts 2:14-28) challenge the early community with the transforming belief that “God raised Jesus from the dead and offered the community hope and a sense of gladness.” Peter alerts the early church that they were “ransomed from the futile ways of their ancestors not by gold, but by the blood of Jesus” (1 Peter I: 17-21). Peter would be no stranger to pain and suffering as he preached the resurrected Christ. Believing that Christ was in his heart, Peter was confident that God would give him the necessary imagination and words to draw others into hope. “Should anyone ask for the reason for this hope that is yours, be ready to reply, but speak gently and respectfully. If it be God’s you will suffer, it is better to do so for good deeds than for evil ones (1 Peter 3:13-17).
The Gospel reading from Luke (24:13-35) provides an infusion of hope for two disciples who were uncertain of Jesus’ claim to resurrect after his crucifixion. Leaving Jerusalem for their hometown of Emmaus, both of them struggled with their disillusionment. Unrecognized, Jesus joined them on the road to Emmaus bolstering their ebbing belief with an astonishing array of theological connections that would diminish their fears. It was in the breaking of the bread that these disciples would recognize Jesus. “When Jesus took the bread, blessed and broke it” their eyes were open. Returning back to Jerusalem, these two disciples joined the other disciples, and all were “at home” with the Resurrected Jesus. In the midst of their doubts, they were giving the certainty of faith and an orientation of hope. Indeed, all of us need to be at home with the Risen Savior.
How wonderful is it for you to be alive with the knowledge of the resurrection? Does the resurrection of Jesus have an influence in your life? How does it shape your thinking and your sense of hope?
“I’ve lived in the ghetto here more than a year, in Terezin, in the black town. There is little to eat and much to want. Yet we all hope the time will come when we go home again. Now I know how dear it is.”
Can you trust in God and be at peace, even in unusual and different circumstances? The Easter invitation is to be at home with the peace of Christ wherever you might be. Life never unfolds just quite the way you might like it to, but the steadiness of the presence of Jesus in our lives allows us to use our imaginations as well as to hope for better things to come.
Can you give reasons for the hope that is within you and can you appreciate how wonderful in is to be alive?
