Robert Fisk's narrative and
John 2 description of the Cana wedding diverge in strangely parralel ways:
1 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
When I arrived there, there were a number of, maybe 20, 30 children, the corpses of children, lined up outside the government hospital, hair matted, still in their night clothes.
2 Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding.
The bomb that killed them was dropped at 1:00 in the morning.
3 And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, "They have no wine."
And they ran out of plastic bags. They were trying to put the children in plastic bags, their corpses, and they would put on it, you know, "Abbas Mehdi, aged seven," and so and so, aged one, and use a kind of sticking tape on it.
4 Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come." 5 His mother said to the servants, "Whatever He says to you, do it."
6 Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece. 7 Jesus said to them, "Fill the waterpots with water." And they filled them up to the brim.
But then they ran out of plastic bags, so they had to put the children's corpses in a kind of cheap carpet that you can buy in the supermarkets, and they roll them up in that and then put their names on again. I was having to go around very carefully and write down, from the Arabic, their names and their ages. It would just say "Abbas Mehdi, aged seven, Qana."
8 And He said to them, "Draw some out now, and take it to the master of the feast." And they took it. 9 When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom. 10 And he said to him, "Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!"
One by one the children's bodies were taken away from the courtyard of the government hospital on the shoulders of soldiers and hospital workers and were put in a big refrigerated truck, very dirty, dusty truck, which had been parked just outside the hospital. The grownups, the adult dead, including twelve women, were taken out later. The children were put in the truck first. Pretty grim. As I said, the children's hair, when you could see the bodies, were matted with dust and mud. And most of them appear to have been bleeding from the nose. I assume that's because their lungs were crushed by the bomb, and therefore they naturally hemorrhaged as they died.
I do not know what this diary is supposed to say. The two texts, John 2 and Robert Fisk's report just struck me as having one too many parallels to ignore. Maybe it is just a sign of my seeming impotence to say anything more. Many analyses have been written already so what else can it be added? I know that the true place of Cana, if you even believe it existed, is not verified; it could have been this village or somewhere nearby but is it important really?
How can we proceed from weddings to massacres, how can we proceed from tranforming water to wine to squeezing blood out of children's lungs, is still unfathomable to me. I am not innocent as long as I keep on silent, yet I guess I will carry the burden of that great sin (keeping on with my life as if nothing happened) until circumstance forces otherwise.
The world is not black and white but unfortunately too many times it takes the grey of "hair matted with dust and mud."
If, in a thought experiment, we accept that Christ or Mahdi or Vishnu as Kalki do return, hopefully our chances of hearing: "Come, enter the Kingdom. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and you visited me." will not rely solely on writing diaries...
