This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
I am probably not alone in being haunted by film of the explosion in Beirut on Tuesday evening. The fearful images are powerful in themselves, but they also provoke a terrible sense of awe – at the destruction and death wrought by the apocalyptic suddenness of such a violent event. Observing from a distance is bad enough; being there must surely be appalling at every level.
As the shock turns yet again to musings about meaning, every witness will have their own vocabulary – their own associations – as they try to articulate the impact on their own sense of mortality or fragility.
I was probably also not alone on Tuesday in associating images from Lebanon with those from Hiroshima 75 years ago today. I remember seeing film of that first atomic bomb and reading John Hershey’s harrowing account from 1946 of the aftermath. Even at the time this provoked both scientists and ethicists to question whether technology had once again outstripped morality. In the light of our proven technological ability to do something, how do we then ensure that the question as to whether we should do it is properly addressed – and in which terms?
This is not easy. In the real world things don’t happen tidily or sequentially. But, I think there are other images that might help in the search.
In the Christian calendar, today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. This recalls when Jesus took three of his friends up a mountain where his appearance was transfigured by light before their eyes. They were dazzled. But, they didn’t quite get what they had just witnessed. Jesus had to explain to them, but also urge them not to rush around telling everyone what they had seen. Don’t leap to judgment when you don’t have the full picture or you haven’t had time to think it through.
What is also significant here is that Jesus leads them back down the mountain and they head towards Jerusalem where he knows that horrors await him and them. No fantasy idealism. No seduction by an ideological dream. Just – how to live with the vivid experience as cold, unpredictable (and perhaps incomprehensible) reality unravels before them.
The question whether we should do what we can do has not gone away since Hiroshima. Nor has the warning not to rush to judgment or blame simply because of a prior association. And nor has the need to share fragile humanity by prayer and practical care for those who suffer what they might never understand.
