This comes from my small journal. I am sorry if this induces negative stirrings in you. But we all believe in something, and this is what I believed last night.
the boy and the kalashnikov
Tonight hundreds and thousands of Dutch people gather in the streets of Hilversum, awaiting the bodies of the fallen from the MH17 plane crash. There is silence… Then a few start to applaud when they hear the word of mouth that the hearses are soon going to pass by them. Some choose to still remain silent. Some choose to throw flowers on the road and to the cars as they zip by.
Unified voices and music from the choir and stringed instruments resound on the white walls and people sitting on the pews of Sint Joris, Amersfoort. Some sit in silence, looking straight into the big, intricate windows that lets white sunlight in. Some are on their knees praying. Some have their faces in their hands, tears collecting on their palms and dripping away, slowly. Different men and women of God climb to the lectern and encourage him who has ears, let him hear.
It is happy, and it is sad, to realise that most of times all the people in the world are united because of the death of someone. At first those who have been their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers or friends of those who were lost grieved - because after all, they loved them with all of their hearts. Then more people see them grieving. It then spreads like a virus, when we realise we are capable of feeling how they feel, imagining that we are also placed in their situation.
But what about those people who have lost their feeling? What about the pro Russian rebels who shot down the Boeing 777 jet thinking it was an enemy plane? They have lost their feeling.
What about those we called heartless, who plundered the remains of the people who had crashed? They did not show the deceased respect, and we have the anger of a thousand mighty whirlwinds about that. They have forgotten the very principles of what humanity stands for. Oh, God help us, they have also lost their feeling. Yet the people stand in Moscow, standing in for them, begging on their knees, "Forgive us."
In a way, the people we see as antagonists have also died. The people on the streets of Hilversum and on the church at Amersfoort have also died a little. And as I am human, I will mourn all of the dead.
"When will we stop all this? When will we stop looking for solutions that have no truth in them? When will we rise up again and accept that there is only one way to rise, one way to be resurrected, one way to be good again? When will we stop using human lives as a currency? When will we start to feel again, will we feel seeing that Rizpah had climbed the hill, put on sackcloth, chased the birds away from her dead children till the rain poured down? When will we love our neighbour as ourselves? When will we have peace? When will we all know that the only peace there is is in Jesus Christ, the author of it?"
