No date is evil
Some people will wake today with the heaviest of hearts – their minds and memories drawn inexorably back to this date 12 years ago. Others will busy themselves, burying the pain of yesterday in the activity of today.
In Chile today, a group of people will make a deliberate pilgrimage back to the place of their worst memories. Led by Anita Maria Jimenez, a music teacher, pianist, and former prisoner, a small choir will gather at the site of the notorious prison Villa Grimaldi, today. In a string of prisons during the darkest days of the Pinochet regime she organised choirs as a morale booster. There was more to it than that, though:
‘For us, singing was a form of resistance and defiance but also a way of reasserting solidarity… it was joy in the midst of so much pain.’
Years ago, reflecting on his time as a hostage in Beirut, Terry Waite talked about the need to ‘redeem suffering’, and maybe music is one of the best ways to do it. Blues music, the negro spirituals which preceded them and men like Vedran Smailovic, the ‘cellist of Sarajevo’ are all testament to this.
However you mark September 11th, make sure that you make the most of the hours and minutes which this day gives to you. In so doing you deny evil the last word and redeem the time you have. I plan to invest a few minutes listening to the track below – brought together from the love letters exchanged between serving soldiers and their wives back home, it transfigures loneliness into beauty in the voices of the Military Wives Choir. Enjoy.