Chi
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Joined: 04 Aug 2004
Posts: 513
Location: Massachusetts
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 Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2010 8:44 am Post subject: Making miracles |
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I read this in the book Making Miracles. an interesting contrast
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Making Miracles page 248.......
People who have survived terminal illness and people who have survived lethal environments share some basic qualities. For example , the few people who lived through the horrors of the nazi concentration camps remained hopeful despite the hopelessness of the situation. In None of Us Return, Charlotte Delbo offers a graphic depiction of the differences in attitudes between the narrator and another prisoner:
“there’s no hope for us.”
And her hand makes a gesture and the gesture envokes rising smoke.
“We must fight with all our strength.’
“Why?….Why fight since all of us have to…” The hand completes the gesture. Rising smoke.
No. We must fight.”
“How can we hope to get out of here? How could anyone ever get out of here? It would be better to throw ourselves on the barbed wire right now.”
What is there to say to her? She is small, sickly. And I am unable to persuade myself. All auguments are senseless. I am at odds with my reason. One is at odds with all reason.
Counter to rational logic, those who gave the most of themselves fared the best in the death camps. Giving to others actually aided survival. In The Survivor, Terence Des Pres quotes a Treblinka survivor: “ in our group we shared everything; and the moment one of the group ate something without sharing it ,we knew it was the beginning of the end for him.” Those who continued to live consistently served others. According to Stephine Levine, they were the “doctors, the nuns, the priests, the rabbis, the mothering, and the fathering care-givers. They survived because they had a reason to live: love itself, healing itself.
They knew that love is the only gift worth living. That our care for others is our care for ourselves, a deep honoring of being we all share.” Love brought meaning to the concentration camp survivors and to all survivors of serious illness.
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