Bearing Witness, Refusing to Turn Away, Again & Again
How many times must we do this? Does it ever stop? The earthquakes, floods, and fires. The wars. Ukraine last year, still ongoing. Israel and Gaza now.
The photos and broadcasts coming from these two wars are horrendous, heartbreaking, endless. It fills the heart with such pain and shame, that fellow humans could commit these atrocities.
How often we are tempted to turn away from images that seem too horrible, too hopeless, that make us feel too helpless to even think about it, let alone do something ourselves to help. Tempted to turn off the news and retreat to some safe place inside ourselves where we don't have to look, to feel.
It’s human nature to do so, to turn from the ugly face that our human condition sometimes shows us. To pretend it’s not there, or doesn’t affect us, or isn’t us, or won’t be us, or someone we care about, some day.
But it’s important to resist that urge to turn away, even if we have no way to address it. It has to do with not only bearing witness to an atrocity that should not be forgotten nor repeated, but also with simply being there for another human being in pain, “bearing” that pain with them. Acknowledging in whatever small way we can that they are not alone in their pain. That we stand with them, if only in spirit, if only in refusing to turn away, to pretend it doesn’t exist, or that they don’t matter.
As the artist Traversi did in painting "The Beggar" so long ago.
An artist friend shared this painting some years ago on her blog, writing:
It is the emotion and compositional strength of this image as well as pure skill in foreshortening that had me coming back to this painting several times. Every centimeter of this canvas is in full use and allows you no room to shrink from the image. The beggar has seen us. We must respond in some way and whatever that way is he and the world will know. It is our human condition we are facing in this painting. (Terrill Welch – Creative Potager)
I feel blessed by Traversi’s painting, his refusing to turn away from suffering, but instead looking deeply at it. Revealing the humanity he saw in the face of suffering reveals his own deep humanity, and challenges us to do the same.
I cannot help the suffering Israelis and Palestinians and Ukrainians. But I can refuse to turn away from their suffering. I can bear witness to their plight. And pray for them. And pour out my love to them. And promise them and myself that I will not let the hate and vengeance that causes these tragedies to find a place in my heart. It's the only way such tragedies will ever cease--when we each do this.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
"The function of language is not to inform but to evoke . . . responses." —Jacques Lacan
Well said. We've all, the whole lot of humanity, been de-sensitized beyond belief. I think that is an important part of why many "look away". But then there is the aspect of those that look but don't see ... we look not just with our eyes or our rationality but also with our deep connection to life itself. But so few do this, see there for the sake of chance, go I. Another problem is how our media sanitizes what we see. I've tried to use the infamous image from Wikileaks of young American drone operators killing innocent Iraqis on the street, straffing them with machine gun fire. No social media organization will allow me to use it, even in a poem, as part of a work of art. I go against "community standards" yet, our youth play and kill in the same fashion, in single shooter games daily. The world I profess, is upside down. One sided (single) horror. Never the other side.