Quite a few
years ago my husband and I read a book we loved, The Dun Cow by Walter
Wangerin Jr. The book, published in 1978, won the National Book Award. It was
the first of three in a series. The second, The Book of Sorrows, I did
not read. The year that was published I had several years of my own sorrows and
could not read it. The third book, Peace at last, I just finished. I am
not writing a review but I am using that book to write about the times we are
experiencing. We, some of us, are living as through it is the fifties, or the nineties,
the years after a larger amount of evil had been defeated, and it seemingly
placed us in a more peaceful and unconcerned time.
While peace
is in that last book’s title it opens with Wangerin’s understanding of the
horrors of human evil, but always in the shape of a world of creatures, animals
that fit as pictures of a broken humanity. The world in that first book was orderly
and with purpose. But to help you understand I will quote an important explanation
from the first book, The Dun Cow:
“The earth
then had a face: smiling blue and green and gold and gentle. Or frowning in
furious gouts of black thunder. But it was a face, and that’s where the
animals lived, on the surface of it. But under that surface, in its guts, the
earth was a prison. Only one creature lived inside of the earth, then, because God
had dammed him there. He was the evil the animals kept. His name was Wyrm.”
In the story
Wyrm escapes and the animals battle the evil let loose on their earth. Wyrm is diminished
but the fallenness remains. The last book is the story of two groups of
creatures. One group is troubled, hurt and unsure but traveling toward safety
and peace, the other, not really traveling, but attempting to gather all of
their unholy desires to and for themselves, each individually. This begins with
a rebel wolf who seeks others to dominate. Before his story is finished there are
bloody deaths, rape, torment—a wicked disjointed group which will in the end
turn into a horde seeking blood and the death of righteousness. The chapter, the first in the book, caught my
attention immediately because it was a clear picture of evil. I could feel it. Something
that is here, today, now, and too many do not see it. But many do see it.
They see it
in the families torn apart, the beatings, the killings, the deportations. They
see it in those officials fired in their attempts to preserve justice and the
officials who lie, seek power and in their seeking are cowards. They worship at
the feet of one who has given himself over to the supposed promises of worldly gain.
The one who himself worships gold. They, the power seekers and their door to
power, egotism cloaked in dementia, will fall as the evil animals do in Peace
at the last. Without repentance, in a rather bloody worldly lust, they will
begin to fall.
The others, the
animals, those who sought an ancient path, traveled by another wolf, who smells
the righteousness and hears them calling home, come at last to a great rock and
disappear into its safety. These others
are not perfect, but not cowards, sometimes despairing but constant in honesty
and integrity. And when the horde wants
to fall on them spilling blood these friends, travelers, fall into the rock. They
are hidden in the rock.
My question
has to be, why are there those who do not see the evil. Sure, there is no
longer Hitler’s Nazi’s or Stalin’s killings or the many other oppressions of
the world. But this evil is not different, it's just at the beginning and we
seem not to be able to weep until the whole evil plan has opened upon the
world. Until Ukrainians are starved to death as in the Holodomor or until the
Jews are destroyed as in the Holocaust. Until all those seeking safety, the Mexicans,
the Somalians, the Iranians, the Afghans, etc. have been sent away to suffer and to die.
In the book Peace
at Last there is the community, the journey toward safety and then home.
There is peace. It is there in reality, there for us. There for those named
above. The rock it is still there. Again,
quite a few years ago I wrote a poem which I didn’t quite finish. But here it
is for the end of this.
A cluster, a
gathering,
Two people
or more, not alone the One is there.
I saw a
cluster of violets today,
Against the
inside wall
They
flowered in abundance in cold February.
Their roots
grew deep beneath the wall warmed soil.
A gathering,
a cluster,
Where two or
three are gathered,
Together, I Am
in the midst of them.
