There have been various ruminations of late marking twenty years since the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Today, for instance, marks the the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the Republika Srpska as an ethnic Serbian enclave. It was here that some of the worst of the genocidal events would drown the region in blood and terror.
This year it is also Holy Saturday, in the Christian myth, the day God is dead…
I don’t know what lessons we should take away from this sad confluence of events. However, I find my mind keeps returning to Yugoslavia. There was so much sorrow, so many terrible things that happened on so many sides, and merely twenty years ago. A blink of the eye. Yesterday.
It is a testimony to the evil people can do to each other.
And not in the distant past. Yesterday. That blink of an eye.
But, there is something else here.
We’re aware of the problems of “outsiders” injecting themselves in the various internal conflicts around the globe. In our own country there is a recoiling against our being involved in foreign adventures. I know my own disgust at how we were driven by lies into that misbegotten adventure in Iraq. Something that has yet to play out its consequences.
And…
The horrors of Yugoslavia’s disintegration bear testimony to what happens when the world sees horror and doesn’t take action.
Rock.
Hard place.
Individual.
Community.
Boundaries in a world that bleeds into itself.
Holy Saturday.
The koan of life and death, of the individual, and of community…
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