by Rev. John Indermark
Seeing Bucha
On Sunday, its liturgy was blasphemous
An old man lying alongside his bike
Plastic ties around wrists that preceded the kill shot
A hand and a foot exposed from the sand half-filling a trench
Seeing Bucha
The very name stung with reverberations
In German, buche is the word for “beech tree”
In German, wald is the word for “forest”
In Germany, Buchenwald carried out the genocidal fever of Nazis
In Ukraine, Bucha endured the same
Seeing Bucha
Recalled for me the story told by Elie Wiesel in Night
A teenager himself imprisoned in Auschwitz,
Wiesel and the rest of the camp witness the hanging of three prisoners
One of them is a boy
Whose dying exceeds half an hour because of his small size
As the agony stretches on, a man behind Wiesel asks outloud
For God’s sake, where is God?
Wiesel reports that he then heard a small voice inside him answer:
Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows . . .
Seeing Bucha
God is seen – in an old man, in bound wrists, in a sandy trench
For if God is not there, God will never be seen.