Everything Is Illuminated

The past sheds light on the present, gifting it with the meaning we yearn for. Without memory we lose ourselves. In the film (of the same name) based on the book "Everything Is Illuminated," Jonathan Safran Foer, an American Jew, seeks his past in his grandfather's shtetl in the Ukraine, Trochenbrod, from which in 1942, by the Nazis, almost everyone perished, except, luckily, for him. The shtetl was erased from the earth. Here from a historical website:

in 1942 . . . the first "Aktion" was carried out
followed by 2 others later on that year
the majority of the Jews in town
were brought to the forest
and were slaughtered all-together
and buried in mass graves
while the few remaining Jews
were locked in the local synagogue
and killed when it was set on fire.
In the two former Jewish towns now
there were no longer Jews to be found.

Like Jews, Christians can say with emphasis that without a past we would have no present. Without the drama of Jesus' Incarnation, Death and Resurrection, and the lives of those who followed, our present would be unrecognizable. How is it that supposedly "Christian" people could have so forgotten their past that they perpetrated such unspeakable acts against other human beings, and fellow sharers in the Judeo-Christian tradition? It boggles and sobers the mind.

The movie relates how the Nazis forced the Jewish residents to spit on the unrolled scroll of their synagogue's Torah, the most sacred book of their sacred identity. Spit or not, they were all killed by the barbarian Nazis, creatures of darkness who recognized no (Christian) past, only a future dominated by power.

Our Christian past must be made present to be alive. Are we living our tradition, or has the culture around us so beset us that we spit on it, or, as Milan Kundera claims (see Wikipedia article quote), see it as lost and fit only to be "illuminated in the aura of nostalgia"? On the contrary, we must strive to see our past as making reality appear for us in the present, allowing it to be experienced as it is, radiant in faith, hope and charity.

How does the past influence us? Maybe the model is the passage from Luke 2:19: "But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart." In the film, the one remaining former-resident of the town, Augustina, the boy's grandfather's wife, buried her wedding ring in the ground before she was killed. The characters in the film wonder why. Her sister, who escaped, and who, like her grand nephew Johnathan, is a collector of the shards of their past identity, said, "it was so you (Johnathon) would be created to find it." As I understand this, the gift of love given creates the future, even out of shards. This, of course, is a way of stating the mystery of our (and the Jews') faith, that a loving God re-claims the future out of the chaos of a fallen past. The creative agent is love. Only love creates.

Listen to Music from "Everything Is Illuminated"

Again, from the move, Sunflowers. (The lyrics are lines from an Alexander Pushkin poem called "To A.P. Kern." in English: In the torture of hopeless melancholy, In the bustle of the world's noisy hours, That voice rang out so tenderly, I dreamed of that lovely face of yours. That voice rang out so tenderly, I dreamed of that lovely face of yours. Then to my soul an awakening came, And there again your face appeared, Like a vision, fleeting, momentary, Like a spirit of the purest beauty. Like a spirit of the purest beauty.")

More music from the movie, "Odessa"

More music from the movie, "Inside-Outside"

Again, from movie, "War is over."

Again, from movie, "Prelude"

Listen to Theme from The Diving Bell.