Remembering Evil

Miroslav Volf has a beautiful essay on forgiveness and memory in the current Christian Century.  Here's an excerpt:

In a prayer on behalf of the survivors of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel writes: "Oh, they [the survivors] do not forgive the killers and their accomplices, nor should they. Nor should you, Master of the Universe. But they no longer look at every passer-by with suspicion. Nor do they see a dagger in every hand. Does this mean that the wounds in their soul have healed? They will never heal. As long as a spark of the flames of Auschwitz and Treblinka glows in their memory, so long will my joy be incomplete."

Christian readers should not stumble over the first lines of this prayer and thus miss the import of its last sentence. For Wiesel's request for the Master of the Universe not to forgive killers and their accomplices echoes the psalmist's request that the sins of "wicked and deceitful men" may "always remain before the Lord" (109:15). Wiesel is a modern-day psalmist, not a follower of the Christ whose forgiveness knows no bounds.

But the last line of the prayer makes a point on which the followers of Christ will agree with Wiesel: Remembering horrendous evils and experiencing joy, especially joy in one another, are irreconcilable. A world to come that keeps alive the memory of all wrongdoings suffered—and not just of horrendous evils—would be not a place of uplifted radiant faces but one of eyes downcast in shame, not a place of delight in one another but a place enveloped in the mist of profound sadness. For Wiesel, the unforgiving and never-to-be-forgotten memory of the flames of Auschwitz precludes the experience of pure felicity. So it would be for everyone who remembered the wrongs of history truthfully and whose heart had not grown hard.