My eccletic adieu to Simon Wiesenthal

It has been a very tiring day. Nothing went as planned. Got real cranky with God. After all: Hurricane Rita !!!

What gives?

Listened today to a broken hearted woman who cannot conceive by any means, whose husband is filled with rage and booze.

Standing before some grief all a priest can do is listen and pray.

Yep got even crankier with God.

Then followed conversations with several priests and laity about wounds in the Church.

What gives Jesus?

Hardly any sleep last night Jesus, being in pain hearing the tears rising from the earth and now a day filled with such pain.

Are You listening Jesus? Of course you are because sometimes You too stand in our grief, weep with us, and pray.

You know we hate mysteries because we’re pretty smart down here on earth. We can make stuff! We can fill the skies, the oceans, the earth, our drinking water with our stuff. Why we can even send our stuff to other planets and leave our stuff there.

We can fix anything – except ourselves which is why we use so much of our stuff to make our hatreds and prejudices so violently real.

With our ability to make stuff there seems to be [ I think this would be a problem with our hearts ] a parallel inability to share our stuff so that everyone has something to eat, a place to raise a family, a generous portion of dignity, sufficiency of pure love.

By the way speaking about Katrina and Rita:  why is it always the poor ones, the simple kind hearted ones that get whacked with so-called natural disasters – but its YOUR creation!!!

Why is it that because people are deemed to be ‘not like us’ rivers of blood flow from the Shoah, in Sudan, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and oceans of blood accumulate because even the little ones in the womb are constantly deemed to be ‘not like us’ ?

Who are they, those who determine which person or race or religion or unborn child is ‘not like us’?

Can’t You Jesus make them wear jackboots or something so we who are definitely ‘not like them’ could at least hear them coming?


After, no longer ranting at Jesus, I grabbed a coffee, turned on the BBC news and was shocked to hear that the living beacon of light, a living  reminder of the profound inner strength of our Jewish Brothers and Sisters, Simon Wiesenthal had breathed his last on earth.

Grief clamped upon my heart for a hero, a teacher, had been called home.

Simon my Elder Brother I shall join with Jewish brothers to participate in the Kaddish.

Then in the Divine Office of the Church shall pray Psalms for you.

It is not merely from the heart of King David the Psalms have life. It is that they have been prayed, often times wrenched from the hearts of suffering people across the millennia that they are a pray for all peoples, all times.

Prayed daily across the earth by our Elder Brothers and Sisters in faith the Jewish People to be sure – and we Christians pray them too.

My heart sings with joy everyday when I pray the prayer of the Church knowing I am praying in unison Psalm by Psalm with my Jewish Brothers and Sisters!

Sung, danced in hearts through melodic movement of those who pray, chanted in monasteries from the Great Desert to the Holy Mountain, across the centuries in every Holy Mass as our communal response to the word of God.

Even the very maw of the hell Simon understood was an aberration of humanity, even there in the incomprehensible evil of the Shoah the faith, trust, power of the Psalms showed, and show still there can never exist enough camps, enough chambers, enough ovens, not even enough terrorists in all the universe to ever silence faith, trust, truth, courage, life, love.

Neither the Nazis nor any other hatemonger; not a single bigot or predator, understands, least of all do terrorists understand: LOVE IS STRONGER!

As a seminarian, dear Elder Brother Simon, I was blessed to be taught by a good Rabbi and some elderly, but so beautiful in their humanity, survivors of the Shoah.

They taught me love is stronger. They honoured me by looking through my eyes into my soul and taught me love is stronger.

I honour you dear Elder Brother in Faith Simon, and them, with the Psalm of the humble, the confident, the human person who knows that defying gravity the tears of His Children rise up, pierce the clouds, even piercing through hatreds dank smoke, all the way to His Throne in heaven were He now embraces you my Brother:

Psalm 131 – A song of King David for all of us:

Lord, my heart is not proud,
My eyes are not haughty.
I don’t busy myself about great things,
Too sublime for me.
Rather, I have stilled my soul, hushed it like a weaned child.
Like a weaned child on its mother’s lap, so is my soul within me.

Israel, hope in the Lord, now and forever.