U.S. Families of Dead Raise 600,000 Dollars for Fallujah Refugees (Agence France Presse)
Sometimes, seemingly out of the blue, wholly unexpected acts of love and moral clarity cut through the dark tangles of cynicism in my heart and through the resignation I sometimes feel towards darker manifestations of American culture - American displays of xenophobic hatred towards poorly understood foreign peoples and, in Iraq, devastating and often indiscriminate aerial bombardment which - according the recent Lancet/John Hopkins study that I discussed in a recent diary - has likely killed 40-50 thousand Iraqi women and children since the onset of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by American and coalition forces.
Rosa Suarez and the other grieving parents and relatives of her group have turned their grief towards a great and transcendent act of love which, to me, seems close to the miraculous : "....The Iraq war took away my son's life, and it has taken away the lives of so many innocent Iraqis. It is time to stop the killing and to help the children of Iraq,"
These acts represent, in my opinion, a sublime alchemical transmutation - of very deep sorrow at irreplaceable personal loss into of one of the purest and most deeply Christian, in the best and truest sense of Christianity, expressions of love I have had the privilege to know.
But this act trancends, I believe, mere boundaries of religious faith - as an expression of the finest spirit of all the great religions and faith traditions which hold that, to move closer to the divine, one must rise above mere human inclinations and passions and towards a compassionate love for, and a selfless identification with, human suffering - and even, for some, all life's suffering - everywhere.
Reading of this magnificent, courageous act of love I was deeply moved - first to thank those families for shining a light that illumines my path and those of countless others - but, beyond that, to challenge myself with this : how could I, in my own life, approximate in my own small, humble fashion, such redemptive and transformative acts of love ? In my own life, what would those be ?