ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Good Morning
This weekend hearts have gone out to the people of Colombia as more than 250 people have died in a mudslide engulfing their lives. The death toll adds to the 90 killed by flooding in Peru earlier in the year.
As with all disasters, unconsciously, we wait for the numbers to help us weigh our response. How much of the store of our attention and compassion should this item of news receive? The statistics of loss deciding how long something lingers in the headlines or in our minds.
This weekend has also seen the death of Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who came to prominence in the USSR in the 1960s for his poem, The Massacre of Babi Yar.
Babi Yar – a ravine outside Kiev – in 1941 was the site of one of the worst single Nazi atrocities of the war in which some 35,000 people were shot in the crevasse that became their mass grave. Visiting twenty years later, Yevtushenko was horrified to find the place a rubbish tip. Indeed, so committed was the state to the act of forgetting that in the same year as Yevtushenko’s visit they tried to fill in the canyon, disastrously causing a damn to burst, killing 146 people in a terrible mudslide. Appalled by the massacre and this desire to forget Yevtushenko wrote his poem as a memorial and as a protest against anti-Semitism in the USSR and beyond, identifying himself in the poem with the Jews who died there, with Jews throughout the ages, and even with Christ who died as a Jew, tortured and still bearing ‘the marks of nails’.
In a world saturated by news it’s hard for us not to gauge our responses by the numbers involved and sometimes the numbers are truly shocking. Yet the significance of a death – any death – any loss – as Yevtushekno’s poetry draws out - brings us close to what we might consider most precious, even holy.
In a poem translated, People, he writes:
In any man who dies there dies with him
His first snow, kiss and fight.

Christians believe that death and loss are real, but that they do not have the final word - a belief founded on the events of the first Easter. Yet resurrection is no Shakespearean comic reversal of fortunes that wipes away all the joys and sufferings of life that have made it particular. For the risen Christ - in paintings everywhere – as well as in Yevtuskenko’s poem – still bears the marks of his wounds. So, for Christians, Christ’s resurrection bears witness to the God who holds and holds precious our individuality, numbering even the hairs of our heads, and ‘the first snow, kiss and fight’ of everyone - including those whom today we remember and mourn – from Babi Yar, in Colombia and closer to home.