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Radio 4,3 mins

"It’s now 70 years ago and the first hand accounts are turning from living memory into history." Canon Angela Tilby - 06/08/15

Thought for the Day

Available for over a year

Good morning. Thirty two years ago on August 6th 1983 I was waking up to coffee and rolls in a hotel in Hiroshima. I’d come with a young American theologian, Jim Garrison, and we were making a film for the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ about the shadow the Hiroshima bomb had cast over all of our lives since 1945. Jim was agonised by the question of where God had been during the bombing. But though we couldn’t answer that we were both incredibly moved by the Remembrance ceremonies of the 6th August. I remember a huge symphony orchestra playing solemn music as state officials, politicians, and representatives of survivors associations processed through blazing heat surrounded by thousands upon thousands who came to remember and to grieve. Later, at night, we watched as little paper lanterns flowed down the river representing the souls of the dead. The whole day was overhung with a terrible sense of nothingness. As a film-maker I found myself unable to express this nothingness except in terms of shadows and sunlight, the absence of life, and silence. Until the mid 50s the scale of suffering was kept secret. The strike on Hiroshima on 6th August and Nagasaki on the 10th ended the war, arguably preventing countless deaths. The Americans went to great lengths to help the Japanese to rebuild the nation. It was a decade before the world heard from the survivors. But finally they spoke: of the great flash of the explosion, of people fleeing with skin peeling from their bodies, of dying children crying for water, and of the radiation sickness that killed by stealth, days, weeks, years afterwards. It’s now 70 years ago and the first hand accounts are turning from living memory into history. As we archive the past there is a real danger that the nightmare is being forgotten, the shadow softened. The world is no longer dominated by two great nuclear powers both restrained by the knowledge that a first strike would lead to mutual destruction. Instead the lines are blurred between war and terrorism with chemical weapons and dirty bombs capable of creating terror apart from the finality that Hiroshima stands for. Yet we remain potentially violent, acquisitive, more dangerous to ourselves and to one another than we have ever been. The psychologist C.J. Jung wrote after the war: “We can no longer wriggle out of our responsibility on the plea of our littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into our hands…..Since we have been granted an almost godlike power we can no longer remain blind and unconscious’. He also said. ‘God is not only to be loved, but to be feared’. Christians like myself tend to talk about God as all loving and all-forgiving. But Jung reminds me of something I struggle with, that God is revealed in darkness as well as light, and I cannot ignore that this morning.

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