Thursday 5 April 2007

Terror nullius

No this is not about Mr Hicks (well not completely) it is as usual about the mountain of stuff that always seesm to o'erwhelm me close to big festivals.
Any way set my mind to thinking about this recurring terror. Yes, that is sometimes what it feels like. I remember one Holy Saturday afternoon where I just felt that it was not going to be possible to get everything ready to begin the Easter Celebration that evening, and indeed I felt in a state of collapse.
Since then I have realised that such terror is largely imaginary, and there is now a sense of when you get to sitting in the darkness on Maundy Thursday evening that it's all down hill from here.
That is one way of dealing with terror...and also realising that what we often name as "terror" is nothing of the sort. Panic, maybe. Faithlessness, perhaps. But mainly one just needs to get a life!
Did set me thinking about terror though.
There is the terror of people driving. I will have to drive the road there and back four times if I want to spend time with my family as well as be a priest. Others will be doing the same thing.
On that stretech there are black and red markers. Too many. Blacks mark the fatalities, and reds the injuries. They increase from month to month. One fear I have is that in a decade or so there will be no stretch of that oft-travelled rad where you cannot see one of these reminders.
Terror, too, because of the fragility of children. One girl a couple of years older than my youngest murdered in the last months, two kids the same age victims of men driving up and trying to grab them. What a terror this must be for them, and for their families.
The terror too of the wretched Tsunami. We don't suffer here, (even though we imagine we might...I live 300 metres above sea level) but the most delicate economies, like the Solomons have no fall back position.
Amidst all this, there is always (for me) a real terror about Good Friday. I often listen to Liszt's Stabat Mater and Passion Meditations. The music is terrifying...you can hear the nails.
For some elsewhere that terror is still a reality.

And there is a real sense of dawn on Easter Day when the terror of death broken open is a reality.This is I think a real terror, but a positive one. It scares us to death to think that things might not be as we think they are.

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