“Now the one who had received one valuable coin came and said, ‘Master, I knew that you are a hard man. You harvest grain where you haven’t sown. You gather crops where you haven’t spread seed. So I was afraid. And I hid my valuable coin in the ground. Here, you have what’s yours.’” — Matthew 25:23-25
Last Monday’s Meditation quoted Eddie Jaku’s book, The Happiest Man on Earth. The fact that he found such happiness is itself amazing, given his experiences in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp. Here’s another quote from his book that is both insightful and amazing:
There are survivors who will tell you that this world is bad, that all people have evil inside them, who take no joy from life. These people have not been liberated. Their broken bodies may have walked from the camps [80] years ago, but their broken hearts stayed there. I know survivors who have never been fortunate enough to feel the freedom that comes from putting the burden of suffering down in order to be able to bear up their happiness.
I was struck by his phrase “but their broken hearts stayed there.”
When we’ve endured tragedy and emerge on the other side of it, I guess it’s natural to still hold onto the pain we’ve suffered and let it win. Freedom and opportunity may lie before us, inviting us, but we can’t move ahead because we fear that what lies in the future is bound by what happened in the past. In the words of the character in Jesus’ parable, “So I was afraid.”
Eddie was able to eventually move ahead positively because he came to appreciate the beauty that lies in the heart of the world. When we emerge from tragedy, that beauty becomes a treasure. It’s something we can appreciate, something that transforms our lives. For Eddie, it took the form of friends and family. Even as he wrote his memoir, he addressed the reader as “my new dear friend.” It’s as if the beauty he opened himself to also opened his heart to love and to be loved.
May we have the grace, once we walk through the door of liberation, to leave the burden of past suffering behind. That way we may be able to “bear up [the] happiness” that God offers today.