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 In The Plague, by Albert Camus, Father Paneloux provides a long exposé about the scourges befalling men because of divine will. As Christ did, he passively accepts Evil without questioning for a minute the eventual motivation of such a divinity.
The Christ himself, at a certain point during his agony, let out his lamma sabachtani. Not Paneloux - he will die without a single word in his lips.
"A long time ago, the Christians of Abyssinia saw in the plague an effective and originally divine way to obtain eternity. Those who had not yet caught it wrapped themselves in the sheets of the plague-ridden, seeking the assurance of death. This raving desire for health is undoubtedly not recommended, since it denotes a deplorable precipitation, very close to pride.
"One cannot be in a bigger hurry than God. Any action intended to accelerate the immutable order, once and forever established, is conducive to heresy. However, this example brings, at the minimum, a lesson.
"For our more clairvoyant spirits, it illuminates this delicate luster of eternity that exists at the bottom of every instance of human suffering. This light brightens the twilight paths that take us to freedom. It manifests the divine will, the one that unfailingly transforms evil into good".
As a non Christian, I see no reason at all for someone to wrap himself in pestiferous sheets so as to hasten his meeting with eternity. However, I think father Paneloux and the Christians of Abyssinia are correct.
If eternity is the highest good, better to hurry up with the trip. In this taste for death resides the logic of Christianity. Its practicing faithful drink blood, eat human flesh and have as their symbol an instrument of torture.
With death I already have enough intimacy. She has reaped the three human beings I loved the most. All I have left now is my own life, which is a piece of cake for me.
I fancy no eternity. Actually, I think eternal life must be unbearably monotonous. I suppose, moreover, that the most ardent desire of a man who wants to be eternal would be to go ahead and die.
I recently lost my wife, the companion I chose in my young years, who stayed with me for almost four decades - and would stay for further decades, if it weren't for a visit from the Undesirable Lady.
Due to her line of work, she had acquaintances all over the country. As soon as she started to die, prayer groups sprung up in several cities, all wishing her prompt return to health.
And there's more: everyone believed that their prayers would be answered by the so-called Supreme Being. The secret, according to the believers, was to keep a positive disposition about the disease and she would soon return to full life.
Such prayer cordons annoyed me since I accept death as a natural phenomenon that follows life. Evidently, however, I could not complain. All those praying people had a deep affection for my wife and they wished her back, from the bottom of their hearts. How could I complain?
There was even someone who said: "We are using up all our credits with the All-Powerful". That was a startling expression to me because I never thought that the All-Powerful operated a kind of banking institution. If that person really bet all his credits, he must surely be bankrupt today.
The praying was useless, as all prayers are. When she actually passed away, the vision of the believers shifted in seconds. "Do not concern yourself. Now she will have plenty of light. She will meet happiness".
Never mind that my beloved Baixinha (Little One) was photophobic and never took dark glasses in that last trip, because another concern occurred to me: if now is her time to be happy, why were all of you praying for her to remain here suffering?
Wouldn't it be a gesture of humanity to pray that she would go ahead and die, so that her suffering would be cut shorter and she could quickly meet her supposed happiness?
I thought about that, but I said nothing. It was not the right moment to question the absolute lack of logic of those human beings who were suffering her death with me at the time.
To celebrate death - say the theologians - is to celebrate a meeting. The meeting for which we yearn our whole lives, which is to see God, our Creator and Lord.
I can't, therefore, understand all the crowds crying at the Vatican and in cities all over the world, praying for the recovery of His Holiness John Paul II. Almost moribund and hardly able to breathe, the poor man tried to speak to the crowds.
In a desperate effort to emit some kind of sound - desperate and useless, since his throat, perforated by a cannula, no longer obeyed his commands - his mouth looked like the mouth of a fish laboring out of the water.
His physical misery was such that the Vatican authorities asked the photographers to avoid close-ups of his face, stiffened by the infirmity.
The way I see it, praying for him to remain among us is a demonstration of uncommon cruelty. No lay person ignores that if he were to remain alive, the pope would have been be reduced to a vegetal state.
Given his fascination for big crowds, John Paul provided a true media show with all the exhibitionism surrounding his death. Death is something personal, a private moment, which the Pope insisted in making obscenely public.
I would have understood if everyone prayed for the man to pass, so that he could be free from the insane suffering befalling his mortal carcass. A priest of such holy purposes, he will certainly be received with all honors by the god of which he is deputy. If the incarnate God himself died, why would his successor not die?
"Where is, oh death, your victory? Where, oh death, your danger?"- Paul asks himself in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians. They don't make Pauls like they used to, I will say. When the television shows us all the crowds sniffling at the death of His Holiness, we can see that Paul's braggadocios no longer fool anyone.
The apostle goes on: "When this incorruptible body is covered with incorruptibility and this mortal body covered with immortality, then the word of the Gospel will be fulfilled: Death was swallowed by victory".
If that were the case, the death of John Paul would be a reason for jubilation. But the crying of the believers attests, on the contrary, to the incontestable victory of death.
I confess that I find very amusing the attitude of these gentlemen who believe that death is a meeting with the Eternal but quickly resort to the latest advances in medicine as soon as Jesus starts calling.
"One can't be more hurried than God", Paneloux used to say. Well, it doesn't seem to me that a Christian should oppose divine design either.
Unless people wanted to impose on John Paul the same agony that was imposed to other valuable instruments of the State, such as Francisco Franco and Marshall Tito.
Those men needed to be kept alive until their successors could be chosen, thus the slow tearing apart of their bodies by savage medical cruelty.
"He can already see and touch the Lord", said Cardinal Camilo Ruini. Rejoice, my beloved. Rejoice as I rejoiced when the head of my beloved Baixinha fell to the side and life abandoned her long suffering body and she left, serenely, on her way to the Great Nothing.
As to all of you Catholics, the All-Powerful meant it this way. After all, a few more days and you will have another one to cry upon.
Janer Cristaldo - he holds a PhD from University of Paris, Sorbonne - is an author, translator, lawyer, philosopher and journalist and lives in São Paulo. His e-mail address is janercr-at-terra.com.br.
Translated by Tereza Braga. Braga is a freelance Portuguese translator and interpreter based in Dallas. She is an accredited member of the American Translators Association. Contact: terezab@sbcglobal.net.
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