Why Did You Doubt

August 7, 2007

Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

“Ah, my lord!” he said to Moses, “please do not charge us with the sin that we have foolishly committed! Numbers 12:11

Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” Matthew 14:31

Piety

Mitsuyoshi Toge, born in Hiroshima in 1917, was a Catholic and a poet. He was in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, when he was 24 years old. Toge died at age 36. His firsthand experience of the bomb, his passion for peace, and his realistic insight into the event made him a leading poet in Hiroshima. This poem is from Hiroshima-Nagasaki: A Pictorial Record of the Atomic Destruction (1978).

How could I ever forget that flash of light!
In a moment, thirty thousand people ceased to be,
The cries of fifty thousand killed
At the bottom of crushing darkness;

Through yellow smoke whirling into light,
Buildings split, bridges collapsed,
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers.
Soon after, skin dangling like rags;
With hands on breasts;
Treading upon the broken brains;
Wearing shreds of burn cloth round their loins;
There came numberless lines of the naked,
all crying.
Bodies on the parade ground, scattered like
jumbled stone images of Jizo;
Crowds in piles by the river banks,
loaded upon rafts fastened to the shore,
Turned by and by into corpses
under the scorching sun;
in the midst of flame
tossing against the evening sky,
Round about the street where mother and
brother were trapped alive under the fallen house
The fire-flood shifted on.
On beds of filth along the Armory floor,
Heaps, and God knew who they were?
Heaps of schoolgirls lying in refuse
Pot-bellied, one-eyed, with half their skin peeled
off bald.
The sun shone, and nothing moved
But the buzzing flies in the metal basins
Reeking with stagnant ordure.
How can I forget that stillness
Prevailing over the city of three hundred thousands?
Amidst that calm,
How can I forget the entreaties
Of departed wife and child
Through their orbs of eyes,
Cutting through our minds and souls?

For Hiroshima-Nagasaki memorial service resources, please go to Faithful Security (National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons Danger).

Study

August 6-9 is the anniversary of the world’s only belligerent uses of nuclear weapons – against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of World War II. On Aug. 6, 1945, during World War II, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. "Little Boy" was dropped by the Enola Gay.

Please do not charge us with the sin that we have so foolishly committed.

Three days later, Nagasaki is devastated when an atomic bomb, "Fat Man", is dropped by the United States B-29 Bockscar. Around 70,000 people were killed instantly. Many more died of radiation sickness and related diseases later.

Please do not charge us with the sin that we have so foolishly committed.

As the reading today focuses on the sins of Miriam and Aaron and the lack of faith of the disciples, today might provide an occasion to examine our national conscience regarding nuclear war and our depth of faith in the Good News preached by Jesus. Just last week, Pope Benedict prayed about the responsibility of those countries which possess nuclear weapons. In his July 30 comments reported by Reuters, he called for a halt to the spread of nuclear weapons and encouraged nations to only use such energy for peaceful purposes. (http://www.enn.com/sci.html?id=964)

Please do not charge us with the sin that we have so foolishly committed.

Jesus was the Prince of Peace. However, we don’t often put things in His hands to resolve. Instead, we take them into our own. Yet, even a non-Catholic like the Dali Lama reminds us, “Whenever conflicts and disagreements arise, our first reaction should be to ask ourselves how we can solve them through dialogue and discussion rather than through force.”

Please do not charge us with the sin that we have so foolishly committed.

Action

Take action into your own hands. Study what the Catholic Catechism says about war and the arms race. “The arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race and the harm it inflicts on the poor is more than can be endured.” (CCC 2329)

Write a letter to Senators Warner and Webb. If interested, write to me for a copy of my letter.