I'll go back
to heaven again.
Hand in hand
with the dew
that melts at
a touch of the dawning day,
I'll go back
to heaven again.
With the
dusk, together, just we two,
at a sign from
a cloud after playing on the slopes
I'll go back
to heaven again.
At the end of
my outing to this beautiful world
I'll go back
and say: It was beautiful. . . .
When
Chon Sang-Pyong wrote that very wonderful poem (귀천) in 1970, he was
extremely sick after years of living rough, without a fixed home, no one caring
for him, suffering from constant malnutrition, and having undergone several
sessions of electric-shock torture at the hands of the Korean security police.
He thought that he might soon be dead, and tried to sum up his response to life
in a few words. He could not imagine how many people would be challenged by and
receive hope from his poem, with its affirmation that this is ultimately a
beautiful world, no matter what terrible things people do to other people and
to themselves. It is amazing that he could write it. But it was in the same
year that he received baptism from a Catholic priest in Pusan and was given the
name Simon.
He
survived, of course, another twenty-three years, and by the time he “went back
to heaven” in 1993 he had already shown many people how beautiful the simplest
things can be. Since his death, his message has spread even wider, with his
books still “steady best-sellers” in the bookstores, with stage plays and
television dramas inspired by his life, and with translations of his poems into
English, French, Spanish, and (soon) German and other languages. More than
10,000 copies of our bilingual English-Korean edition of his major poems have been
sold and the Insa-dong cafe “Kwichon” kept by his widow, Mok Sun-ok, is usually
full.
That
is to say that people are looking for signs of hope. As with Chon Sang-Pyong,
they mostly find meaningful signs of hope in the lives of people who are poor
and sincere. Indeed, the young people who mostly buy his books tend to say that
he is the only completely sincere poet they know. By that they mean that he
never pretended to experience life in unauthentic ways, for the sake of seeming
“poetic”. In the midst of great poverty, with fragile health, he could write, “I’m
the happiest man in the world.” He always recognized that without the constant
care of his wife, he would not have lived so long or been so happy.
With
the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, many people in the United
States and across the world today find themselves wondering, and doubting,
whether the world is really so beautiful and whether they can ever be happy.
They will need to search within themselves for the answers. In that sense, the
pain of the present moment will then have done good, because without that inner
quest, our awareness of beauty and happiness can only be a matter of
superficial sentiments. Without full awareness of the potential ugliness and
pain that life can bring, we cannot hope to come to a proper knowledge of what
it can mean to say that the world is beautiful and we are happy.
Another
way of expressing that can be found in a phrase written many centuries ago by
one of the Church Fathers, Saint John Chrysostom: “The resurrection of Christ
makes of our lives an endless festival.” Certainly everyone enjoys a party, and
the prospect of unending celebrations appeals a lot, but we mostly would
respond to that by pointing out that we do not always feel festive, and that
there is so much pain in the world that we often feel that we ought not to be
happy. Yet the result is frequently sadness, discouragement, and ultimate
resignation; no dynamism and no energy to set about changing the world seem to
emerge from an acute awareness of what is wrong with it. Ugliness does not
teach us what beauty might be.
Violence
and injustice are pernicious because they undermine trust between people and
confidence in the possibility of finding meaning in life. To respond to
violence with violence only adds to the violence, without in fact bringing any
solution to the inherited memories of past wounds that inspired the hatred that
provoked the violence. We have to look elsewhere for the sources of love, hope
and trust.
The
community of brothers that I belong to began in 1940 when a young man from
Switzerland, named Roger, went to live in the village of Taizé, in eastern
France, with the hope that others would join him. At that time the whole of
Europe was being torn apart by violence and warfare, despite almost two
thousand years of Christianity. From the very beginning, the Community of Taizé
has had the word “Reconciliation” at the heart of its vocation. It seemed to
Brother Roger, as he came to be known, that in today’s world, words count for
little. What is required are concrete, lived realities. A few people, giving up
their private lives and careers, and living a common life of sharing and prayer
because of what the Gospel is about, might become a source of inspiration and
hope to many.
Today,
every week during the summer especially, thousands of young adults, with people
of all ages, come to Taizé from all over the world to search together for the
sources of hope. At the height of summer there are 5-6,000 people from over 80
countries each week. They come from many kinds of situations; every week there
are groups from the different parts of the Balkans – Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia,
etc – that have experienced terrible conflicts and massacres. Others come from
the parts of Indonesia which have been torn apart by ethnic and religious
conflict. In other regions there are other challenges to hope, like those
working to assist the AIDS-infected orphans in parts of Africa. All across the
globe, there are countless forms of human suffering caused by (and causing)
loss of mutual trust.
Many
years ago, Brother Roger, launched what he termed “a Pilgrimage of Trust” by
which he hoped that young people might become bearers of hope. They are, he
said, “invisible bearers of peace who, by the gift of their own selves, strive
to undo the seeming determinisms of violence and hatred that history has
produced. They are working to bring into being another future for the whole
human family.” Many young people find themselves challenged very directly by
some particular form of suffering. In some cases it may be the need to care for
a sick parent, or a handicapped neighbor; others, in poorer countries, realize
that many children in their neighborhood cannot attend school and so take time
to teach a few of them informally; many others in rich countries see how little
sincere communication there is between people in their university or workplace
and try to serve as a leaven of trust.
In
the Pilgrimage of Trust, such people come together sometimes, at Taize or in meetings
organized in other places, to pray together, to listen to one another, and to
give each other new hope and energy in order to go on in what may seem a very
humble form of loving. During the times of prayer in these meetings, there is
often a moment when a large icon of the Cross is laid on the ground. The young people
and the brothers gather around it and a few at a time come forward to lay their
foreheads on the Cross, as a sign that they offer all that they are living to
the suffering Christ, who is the Risen Christ. At another moment they light
small candles, passing the flame from one to another, as a reminder that the
reality of Christ’s love shines like a small flame in the darkness of the world’s
suffering. Jesus said: You are the light of the world. When the meeting ends,
each goes back home, to carry on putting the Gospel of love and hope into
practice.
The
wave of hatred and violence that threatens to direct the international response
to the terrorist attacks on the United States moved Brother Roger to send a
message to those close to Taizé in the US: “At a time when many people close to
us around the world are disconcerted by the violence, by the incomprehensible
suffering of the innocent, my brothers and I are praying for those who are
undergoing a time of trial and we ask for consolation for all of them. We also
pray that the Holy Spirit may inspire the hearts of those who are seeking ways
of peace in the human family. I wrote this prayer for the Sunday morning
service in Taizé, and I would like to share it with our friends in the United
States:
Holy Spirit, however powerless we may be, enable
us to bring peace where there are oppositions and violence, and to make a
reflection of God’s compassion visible through our lives. Yes, enable us to love,
and to express it by the lives we lead.
One
of the songs composed for Taizé says “Everywhere where there is love and
sharing, God can be found.” That is surely what Chon Sang-Pyong meant when he
said the world is beautiful. Hidden across the surface of the globe are
countless men, women, children, who bring life and hope to others by little
acts of kindness. The acts of terror may hit the headlines, but what shapes the
future of humanity stays hidden. That is why the Fox said to the Little Prince:
“The essential is invisible to the eyes; only the heart can see it.” Sometimes,
when the papers and television are full of disasters and crime, it is important
for us to remember how much good news there is hidden in the world around us;
otherwise we might be tempted to stop trusting and loving. And that would be a
real disaster.