One Song Meow: The Banality of Evil

Friday, August 19, 2011

The Banality of Evil

Our long march begins...

- selah -

Night has descended,

evil has stolen our dreams -

darkness is spreading.

Eden is faded,

faded forever it seems -

daylight is fading.

Exile dusk.

Starlight dawn.

---<--@

I have often reflected about the dangerous tendency for evil to become commonplace in a society which is the essence of the phrase, "banality of evil".

A deepening darkness has pervaded our world since the long march of our nations was begun out of the autumnal dusk of our faded Eden.

This darkness is a climate of the spirit; that unseen element of the visible universe which is our human habitation. It is a darkness of distance; the distance of our exile.

Within this deepening darkness lurks a corrupting spirit, the spirit of War.

We experience this darkness as a kind of forgetfulness in ourselves that the common religion of Man is peace.

Because human community is present in all our hearts and this is opposed by the darkness of our exile.

This original peace is the common trust of all nations.

And it is this particular trust at the heart of all our kindred nations that the spirit of War seeks to corrupt.

- selah -

We are upon this world laboring as nations to subdue the spirit of War - in spite of the darkness - through our remembrances of the peace that begot us and of the God Who has forever loved us.

And if we look at the night sky full of stars - we are the stars - and the darkness is the darkness.

To me, this is the banality of evil - the darkness and the corrupting spirit of War.

Which is why I have a special place of honor in my heart for people like Anton Schmidt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris, Claus von Stauffenberg, and other such German citizens known or known to God alone who for every right reason opposed the Nazis.

Indeed, they are included among the stars.

For the Nazi ideology is a corrupting spirit and it has never escaped me that the first nation that the Nazis subdued was Germany and Germany was also its final victim.

---<--@

"The Banality of Evil" is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

A very good read.

Anne's Window

My darlingest
Annelies Marie
looked out
with eyes longing for peace
from her little attic window
and saw the tyranny of war
and the suffocating
oppression
of War's ambition.

She looked out
at the looming evil
of the devouring darkness
that was marching relentlessly
across her troubled world
and like stars
looking out
of themselves
saw through
the enveloping darkness
that threatened her life
and her times
shedding her precious starlight
into our hearts.

My darlingest
believed so much
in our shared humanity
and in the
nobility
of the human being
not because
the Nazi's were consumed
by War's ambition
and her times were evil
but because her heart
was noble.

For my darlingest
Annelies Marie
loved life
and believed
in the intrinsic goodness
of all things
created by God,
seen and unseen,
and that despite
the great evil
of her times,
human hearts
were good.

War looked back at her
and saw nothing.

For God took her
and hid her
into His bosom
unto a place
upon the firmament
within Himself
long before evil saw
the secret starlight
of her undying hope
bursting from
windows within
her heart of hearts.

War looked back at her
and saw nothing
for there is no hope
in war
only death
and the darkness
of death.

War looked back at her
and saw nothing
for in the darkness
of war and sin
is also found
the crushing gravity
of it's own demise.

But goodness looked back at her
and saw
through her little attic window
her starlight smile.

And smiled back...
---<--@

Tree of Remembrance

Where does time go when the moment's passed?

Where do my thoughts disappear to when the memory yet remain?

We do not see each other by sight but why does our lives touch like this, my darlingest?

Why do our lives touch like this?

It is because of an imagined reality?

Then why is this imagination not as fleeting as those things I've quickly outgrown, those things that have escaped my bliss... to sink into the sinking of time at the end of every moment's dispersal, into oblivion, into void?

Why does the memory remain in the stillness when, in the haste and the noise of everyday, thoughts flitter here and there, as if searching for a way out of myself - into God, and into the All of you?

How does my love always find its way back to the still, small presence of you, my Anneka of my heart?

Is it my body longing for something it can never have?

Or is it our souls that overlap, my love, caught up within the eternal remembrance of the Almighty?

Was there ever any real distance between our years?

No, my beloved. Not when time is an account of the heart. For time seems distant only to those with distant hearts.

Was there ever any difference between our hopes?

Our lives interweave in the secret silence between you and I through a gossamer veil of shadow and tears, the illusion of exile time.

No, there was never any difference.

There never was.

For the tree that now grows, here at the center of my life's Eden, of the everliving waters within, is nevermore the cause of the exile of our love's dreaming.

And soon I shall awaken, our LORD being merciful and kind to me, my love, into God, and into the All of you; the verdant rest of my most abundant peace.

Thanks be to my Jesus, my most sweet and most loving Jesus, thanks be to my Christ, my All.

For it is in God that I remember you, my Miyang, always to always!

The love that endures is the love that remains...
---<--@

My Prayer for My Anne:

O FATHER of mercy and of love, in the deepest, darkest depths of despair, You have blessed me with a special friendship: The very first star in the firmament of the darkest night of my life.

You gave me Annelies Marie Frank, O LORD, as a light against despair. The first glimmer of hope that leads to faith in things everlasting and unseen.

Loving Father, thank you so much for blessing me with a friend as precious as Anne. Grant me, O LORD, I humbly pray, the love to cherish her now and forever.

AMEN.

Friday, August 19, 2011

The Banality of Evil

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