The Greening (34 page)

The book’s title was taken from a poem by George Herbert, a poem of deep tenderness and beauty. The reader’s attention is drawn to the surprise twist in the poem’s last few lines. “We are here reminded how our first impulse on accepting Love’s welcome is to look about for some form of service. Yet there follows at once a gentle rebuke. May it not be that Love wants to serve us, and, if so, are we too proud to submit!” Robert writes. “‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

“It is only as our love takes on the nature of God’s own love that we can offer to one another the nourishment which alone can satisfy. And while our love must be mainly expressed in daily living, its roots are discoverable in the depths of the prayer life. The feeding at God’s table precedes the command to go out in peace to love and serve the world.”

I saw little of Sister Eleanor during the following few days. Some of her work was being sold for a local charity and she had two canvases to finish, though she made it clear that she would most gladly give me time if I wanted to talk. However, it was a relief to have an excuse not to delve into my feelings.

I returned home from Norfolk feeling more at peace. But the feeling did not last. I was quickly thrown back onto the treadmill of work, with the familiar tension and stress – though the pressure that caused the stress was self-imposed. I did not need to work so
hard. I was driven by my anger about all the injustice in the world. In my heart, I felt restless. Sister Eleanor continued to send me her beautiful hand-painted cards. I meant to visit St Etheldreda’s again, but I had found a way of managing my sadness and preferred not to reopen old wounds.

The seasons changed one into another and after three years of supplying a steady stream of stories, I persuaded the Editor of my old paper to appoint me as human rights correspondent. There had never been such a post on the paper and it felt like a worthwhile achievement. Paul would have been proud of me.

I wondered occasionally what had become of Anna. My enquiries and those of my colleague in the reference library had drawn a blank and been abandoned long ago. But at the back of my mind there remained the knowledge that I had begun a piece of work – my quest for Anna and Julian – and left it unfinished.

It was the summer of 1999, almost eight years since I had picked up Anna’s journal in the antiquarian bookshop. Ismene and I had been in touch a great deal in recent weeks. The people of East Timor, after their many years of struggle and suffering, were at last about to have the opportunity to vote for independence.

However, supporters of the East Timorese were very worried. In the weeks leading up to the referendum, Indonesia’s brutality was intensifying. We were hearing terrible stories about the increasing violence and savagery of the government-backed militia. The Indonesian military resented bitterly the prospect of giving up the territory, which it saw as its fiefdom, and was determined to sabotage the referendum. Ismene was among those who had warned the United Nations of the risk it ran by failing to put in place adequate security measures.

It was Saturday morning. I awoke at seven. I had checked the agency reports the previous evening, and the situation was clearly deteriorating. As I poured my first cup of tea, I heard the phone ringing. I lifted the receiver. It was Ismene.

“All hell has broken loose in East Timor,” she said. Her contacts in the underground had been emailing her for the past few hours, with details of horrific attacks on civilians by the military. “I’m afraid we’re facing a bloodbath.”

As the hours passed, Ismene emailed me with information as soon as she received it. I passed it to a friend, a politician who was known for her support of human rights. I wrote articles for my paper and provided backup research for leader comment. By this time, though, our foreign correspondents out in the field were hard at work, risking their lives to provide on-the-spot cover. Again, I felt inadequate. Why was I not out there, following the story, as Paul would have been?

As one o’clock approached I switched on the television for the news. Horrific, shocking images flooded across the screen. Engraved for ever on my mind was the sight of two toddlers, sobbing and terrified, trying to clamber across rubble to safety, and not an adult in sight to scoop them up, comfort them and save them. It had been shot from a distance, so there was no certainty that the person filming the event had been able to help.

I saw children hanging from razor-sharp barbed wire around the United Nations compound. Their desperate parents, who knew that they were bound to die, had tried to save their children by flinging them over the wire. One little girl hung, screaming, from the wire – too far for away anyone in the compound to reach across and save her. I imagined how her parents must have felt.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were being slaughtered and no one was trying to save them. The pity of it. The shame of it. If I could have run across to where the child hung from the wire, I believed I would have risked the bullets to do so. Was this just easy, brave thinking from a distance? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But why did God not save her? It would have been so easy for him. Why did he allow an innocent little child to suffer and die?

I telephoned Gregorio, who was now a lecturer at a university in the north of England. He asked, “Did you see the images on television?” He sounded broken-hearted. We talked for a while. I tried to comfort him. His sister was missing. There seemed so little that I could say. I said, “I’m so sorry,” and repeated it, feeling the inadequacy of my words. Shortly after, I spoke to Claire, his girlfriend.

She said, “He’s distraught. He’s been so brave all these years; I’ve never seen him so upset. He’s up in the early hours, watching the news. I come downstairs each morning and find him in floods of tears.”

The following day the news was worse… children slaughtered, along with the nuns who were trying to protect them. A young priest had gone out to meet the soldiers, police and militia – those terrible forces of violence and destruction that terrorized a people who had been brave enough to vote for freedom. He had pleaded with them to spare the people sheltering in his church. Mercilessly, they had hacked him to death, and then slaughtered every man, woman and child to whom he had given sanctuary.

I imagined the young priest going forward with such courage and no doubt such fear in his heart. Another image from the television footage came into my mind, of another young priest, the sacred purple of his office around his shoulders, walking swiftly and quietly among a group of terrified East Timorese, carrying a cross. He displayed such dignity, despite his evident fear. What had brought this tender young man to such a fate? Had he been able to make sense of the horror visited upon him and his people? Had he survived? If so, had he kept his faith?

I could not watch the news without breaking down in tears. I could not bear to see the East Timorese suffering so terribly. They were, in some strange way, my people. I had made myself a promise to protect them. Why were these things allowed to happen? I felt helpless. But God was not.

Julian had accepted the paradox that sin was evil but necessary, and that, despite everything, “all shall be well”. Intellectually, I could just about accept that sin was necessary, because it allowed us to learn and grow from our mistakes. What I could not understand was how God could help intervening. If you feel for another and see that person in desperate need, it is a natural, instinctive thing to help, to save them. If such behaviour comes instinctively to us, so that we will on occasion risk our own lives to save others, how is it that such behaviour is not instinctive to God? If the goodness
that inspires such behaviour comes from God, how is it possible that he is not ruled by it?

I suspected that these questions would never be answered. I could not, would not believe in a God who expected me to accept such horrors. All shall be well? Tell it to the East Timorese, I thought. I felt that I, like them, had been betrayed.

Ismene held a party to celebrate the freedom of East Timor. It was a time for joy, but we all knew there was a long road ahead in rebuilding the country and healing the wounds of the trauma of the past twenty-four years. Ismene took me aside for a quiet moment. We had not spoken about personal matters for several months and she wanted to know how my life was.

I confided in her my continuing sadness and raw anger about Paul’s death, about the cruelty in East Timor, about all the injustice in the world.

“If I’d had a faith, I would have lost it during these past weeks,” I said. “How could a loving God let that happen?”

“I understand,” said Ismene thoughtfully. “I have a different interpretation. I think what we have seen underlines the truth of Julian’s message. The East Timorese have every reason to hate not only the Indonesians but us, too, for colluding in the invasion and supporting the illegal occupation. The international community has again failed to protect the East Timorese, during the referendum. But even now, the East Timorese speak not of retribution but reconciliation. They know that this is the only possible way forward.”

“You’re saying we have to forgive because there’s no viable alternative? That may be true, but it still doesn’t explain God’s part in all of this.”

“What would Julian say? She would say, look again to the cross. If you think God betrays us, then what greater betrayal could there be than sending his own son to be crucified? And yet, great good came of it. I suggest you look closely at the cross. And remember the parable of the servant in the ditch. The mystery Julian reveals is that we are blindly ignorant of our own true will. God is keeping his side of an agreement that we made with him, which we have forgotten. He waits patiently for as long as it takes to achieve his intended aim of welcoming us home.

“Julian gives us an eye-witness description of the crucifixion and it’s as harrowing as anything you will see in any war zone. I suggest you go to Julian. Then I’d like to discuss this more fully, in a quieter place. Why don’t we meet for lunch in a few days?”

That evening I took up Julian’s book and read her account of the crucifixion. Julian describes Jesus’ face as having the pallor of death, then becoming blue as the flesh mortified, the nose shrivelled and dried, and the whole body became dark.

There was a bitter, dry wind and it was terribly cold. All the blood had drained away, but there remained some moisture in Jesus’ flesh. The body was as discoloured, dry and withered as if he had been dead a week.

The body was abandoned and drying for a long time, becoming distorted because of the nails and its own weight. The nails had made the wounds bigger and the body sagged under its own weight from hanging. The crown of thorns was baked with dried blood, the hair and dry flesh clinging to the thorns, which enlarged the wounds.

The skin, with the hair and blood, was raised and loosened from the bone by the thorns, where it slashed through, like a sagging cloth, as if it would fall off. This caused me great sorrow and fear, and I would not for my life have seen it fall off.

The garland of thorns was dyed with the blood of wounds, and the head was the colour of dry, clotted blood.

The pain was hard and grievous, but much more so when the moisture was exhausted and everything began to dry and shrink. I saw four ways in which the body had been dried up: the loss of blood; the torment which followed; being hung in the air, as is a cloth to dry; and his need of liquid.

I saw pain so terrible that no words could describe it.

With a first-hand report such as this, it is difficult to remain an observer and not become a participant. I understood what Paul must have felt about witnessing scenes that he could not expunge from his memory. “You see something and you know you must tell others what you have seen,” he had said.

Ismene and I met for lunch and discussed Julian’s description of Jesus’ crucifixion. “Your question is, why does God allow bad things to happen? I would say the things that happen to us here are often things to which we have agreed at soul level. Not at the level of the personality, of course, which understandably fights against the torments it undergoes. At soul level we can profit from pain we endure because it’s always an opportunity to learn and move forward.