Try to Praise the Mutilated World
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What must it have been like for folks living through World War I, 1914–1918? The horror of that war is still something I struggle to understand. I have read many books about those times, fiction and non-fiction. Seen movies too. Soul-stirring accounts that helped me understand the pacifists who rebelled and the patriots who persecuted them. Each was gripped by the horror, each perceived a different way out.
Yet, with all my reading, my movie-going, listening and studying, I never fully grasped the horror of the First World War. Later events, such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, were much more real and present to me—until a few years ago when my husband and I went on a hiking trek in the Dolomites.
I was excited to be going. The Dolomites were purported to be beautiful—unique mountain formations of limestone. And they were in Italy. I love Italy. I love the warmth, the hospitality, and I love the food.
So we were a little shocked when we got there. Our grasp of European geography and history had failed us. The Dolomites are in the German part of Italy. I didn’t know there was a German part of Italy! The local folks spoke German. The local foods were German. As we donned our packs and began our trek, the reasons became apparent. The Dolomites marked the front line, the place of some of the most pitched and devastating battles of the war—something for which we trekkers had not been prepared.
All along the hiking trails that wended their way through the mountain passes were little shrines set up and kept up by local villagers. (They looked a lot like small shrines we see erected near our local streets where someone was struck and killed by a car.) Flowers. Words of love. A memento held with wire. What to me was ancient history was to them a living story, and living sorrow. I noted that as we walked.
Until the day we came through a particular pass. The mountain cliffs rose sheer and tall and beautiful on either side of our trail, not that many yards apart. Our guide stopped us. We looked up at the brilliant blue sky, through the dazzling white cliffs, the pebbled path below our feet. See those hollows, our guide pointed out. The ones up high in the rock cliffs? We looked. There were holes carved in the stone by the wind and weather, human-sized holes, looking like insets for some anticipated statuary.
That’s where soldiers stood and shot across at the soldiers on the other side. They were lined up in this place, Germans on one side, allies on the other, along the tops of the cliffs and in these wind-worn shallow caves. And they shot at each other, kept shooting, until nearly everyone was dead. 6,000 men died in this pass that day.
It was mind-boggling. Heart-searing. They’d just stood there, looking at each other, shooting, until everyone was dead. The terrain was so beautiful. How, I wondered, could anyone commit such horror in the face of the overwhelming beauty of creation?
The group walked on. My husband and I waited, riveted to the spot, trying to take it all in. I bent down and picked up something that had emerged through the stone shards and pebbles. It was the sole of an old boot, surfacing after all these years. I held it, trying to love its dead owner, asking forgiveness for the folly of the human race, letting my tears run freely.
While I stood there, boot sole in hand, my husband picked something else up from the ground. To me it had looked like a stone shard in the path. But he pulled it up and held it out. A human bone, he said. Part of a femur.
We stood in silence many minutes, in this hallowed place. How, I wondered, could they desecrate this beautiful space, awash in the beauty of creation, God’s country, like that?
I do not know the answer. But I know we need to remember. “Try to praise the mutilated world,” The poet Adam Zagajewski advises. Try to praise the mutilated world.
It is an important charge the poet makes. So easy it is to allow the mutilated world to darken all our days, color our perception of the world, fill us with despair. There is so much that is damaged, broken, mutilated. It is easy to be angry or disconsolate, withdrawn into our armor of protection.
“Try to praise the mutilated world,” the poet says. To praise it. To see what is wondrous and amazing despite its horrors and its disappointments.
I would go even further. Try to praise the mutilated world, yes, but push it further. Try to love the mutilated world, I say. For surely love is what it needs. Try to love it despite the ways it hurts you. Try to love it despite the ways it disappoints. Try to love it despite its failings, despite our own.
Love it for its own sake, for what it really is, not what we wish it were. Love it in all its truth and sorrow, its shame and glory. For it is in that kind of love—all-encompassing—that we begin to understand what love really is, who we really are. And maybe even through that, we can truly begin to love ourselves—our mutilated, wounded, imperfect, beautiful selves. We can love ourselves and our world into healing.
She taught in a variety of capacities at Andover Newton Theological School for fifteen years, including serving as the Adjunct Professor of Communication.
Her book, Learning While Leading, Increasing Your Effectiveness in Ministry was published by Alban Institute, and her essays on other topics have been published in anthologies. She co-authored Called to Community, New Directions in Unitarian Universalist Ministry, with Dorothy Emerson.
In addition to serving as an interim minister, she maintains a consulting practice (Learning Edge Consulting) to congregations.
- Try to Praise the Mutilated World - March 1, 2016
