NEW CRUCIFIXIONS
THE traditional Christian meditation for Good Friday is upon a broken-hearted god dying on a cross, but Christians might with profit vary the subject. The bodies in the streets at Sharpe- vine, the squalid camps for the homeless which still litter Europe and North Africa, the tortured inhabitants of Hiroshima in 1945, the obscene sights which met the gaze of the Allies entering Belsen—all of these are in a sense the same thing. Love is sneered at, goodness defeated,. gentleness despised, mercy abandoned. On Good Friday, when the blinkers are off, it is possible to see that we do not mean well, that our inten- tions are not good, that everything does not turn out for the best, and that the worst happens.
'La vie est impossible,' said Simone Weil, echoing the long lihe of Christian writers who have built their superstructure of faith on the foundation of a divine despair. For, Christian or not, we cheat and betray, deny and desert, tor- ture and kill one another all the time. Unwilling t diagnose our own terrible madness, or take adequate precautions against it, we continue to lay waste each other's lives. For much of the time it is possible to escape the pressure of our self-knowledge by withdrawing into hallucina- tory states of one kind and another. Nationalism and militarism, State-worship and racialism, materialism and ambition, indifference and re- ligiosity, and pitiful human delusions. Good Friday is the unbearable moment of lucidity.
Christians are often encouraged in their Good Friday meditations to see themselves in the role of the persecutors of Jesus. Though most people who fill church pews would presumably find it difficult to imagine themselves nailing any living creature to a piece of wood, it is not really very hard to see with what readiness we all consent to cruelty, if only by carefully staying away from contemporary crucifixions. Like so many of the catastrophes of our own time, the judicial murder of Jesus moved towards its conclusion on oiled wheels once the familiar machinery had been started. With the demented logic we have re- cently seen white man employ against black, Fascist against Jew, and dictator against dis- senter, the Jerusalem mob howled for blood on the lunatic grounds that goodness was a blas- phemy against God, while in the background the Establishment deprecatingly washed its hands. The whole episode has precisely the atmosphere ot demonic leadership, bureaucratic muddle and individual cowardice in which we have come to discover that the worst happens.
Life is impossible, yet only a couple of days after Good Friday, Christians are celebrating the joys of immortality. Good Friday shows God passive, obedient to the cruelty of man. Easter, at once the most ingenuous and subtle of re- ligious mysteries, shows God active, bursting triumphantly out of the grave-clothes of the human condition because His nature can no longer be contained. The truth of the event seems to be that love, the only reality, is inde- structible, and that the worst we can do is ultimately powerless against it. It is the same truth that is echoed in the great visionary cry of Juliana of Norwich that 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well' and in Kirillov's moment of under- standing in The Possessed.
'Everything's good.'
'Everything?'
'Everything. Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that. That's all, that's all! If anyone finds out, he'll become happy at once, that minute. . . . It's all good. I discovered all of a sudden.'
'And if anyone dies of hunger, and if anyone insults and outrages the little girl, is that good?'
'Yes! And if anyone blows out his brains for the baby, that's good. And if he doesn't, that's good, too. It's all good, all. It's good for all those who know it's all good. If they knew that it was good for them, it would be good for them, but as long as they don't know it's good • for them, it will be bad for them. That's the whole idea, the whole of it.'
It is by rubbing together the two halves of the Easter meditation that the fire of charity is
produced.
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