This feature is coordinated by The Post-Standard/Syracuse.com and InterFaith Works of CNY. Follow this theme and author posted Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
We’ll celebrate Memorial Day weekend this year with physically distanced barbecues while we wonder what this summer will bring. Will the virus go dormant for a season so we can safely gather, enjoy vacations and worship together? We feel the tension between wanting to keep us and our loved ones, as well as our vulnerable populations, safe and healthy, and yearning to enjoy the freedoms that hundreds of thousands of men and women died to protect.
The best way we can honor their memory of those brave soldiers is to work for peace, so we don’t have to go to war again. Etty Hillesum was a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam in the early 1940s. Her diaries and letters detail the horrors of living under Nazi occupation and in the transit camp at Westerbork. Throughout her writings, she cautions herself and her friends not to give in to the very understandable impulse to hate the German soldiers and camp guards. Seeing a guard behaving inhumanely, she reminds herself that he was once a newborn infant, cradled in his mother’s arms, innocent and defenseless. By choosing not to hate, Hillesum believes she is doing her part to put an end to the potential for evil in each of us. That evil – the failure to love our neighbors and even our enemies – leads inexorably to the evil of war.
Hillesum’s example isn’t an invitation to be a spiritual doormat. It’s a challenge to resist our worst impulses and work to live into our God-given potential. It’s a call to resist hatred with love, work for justice in non-violent ways, debate, and disagree with respect. Choosing not to hate can be our way of bringing healing and peace to the world.
The Rev. Paul Frolick is the rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Liverpool.
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May 24, 2020 at 05:55PM
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CNY Inspirations: Choose Love - syracuse.com
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