Letter #76: The Fourth Virtue
Not Recommended but Required
Liebe Spencher,
By the time this posts, your mother and I should be winging our way home from Germany, where we went to get away from all the antisemites. Our vacation consisted of hikes through the Black Forest (featured in Werewolf Cop) to the beautiful medieval city of Freiberg (likewise featured). Our routine was a three-hour local hike one day followed the next day by a six-hour hike to another town, all of which gave new meaning to the words, “Lord, kill me now.”
Between hikes, I was moved and edified by your posts about faith, hope and charity. In fact, one stretch of our journey seemed to serve as both a commentary on your essay about forgiveness and an appendix to the week’s ruminations.
We were sitting on a bench with a panoramic view of the meadows and forests around the little town of Breitnau. The scene was so achingly pastoral, I slipped into a rare moment of sentimentality. “Everything is so terribly beautiful,” I sighed. “Why do we make such a violent mess of it?” Of course, the bleak answer quickly came to me: “Because that’s who we are. We covet what others have, we grow beyond our borders, we advance and replace those who have fallen behind. War is written into human nature.”
As if to prove the point, we rose and climbed a nearby hill to find a large stone World War I memorial with, across from it, a smaller plaque for the dead of World War II.
It’s not within our power to pardon crimes against others. It’s false grace. What we didn’t suffer, we can’t forgive. But few of responsible age now remain from those bad old days, and no German born since bears the guilt for what they did.
The great columnist Charles Krauthammer liked to say there is no collective guilt, but there is a collective responsibility for a nation to make good on past injustices. Maybe so. But each of us is also a world made new and an individual grows understandably weary of paying those who did not suffer for crimes he did not commit. A modern German must get sick of books and movies endlessly replaying a German villainy not his own. I have visited many bookstores in which the only works on German culture were about the Nazis.
All of which makes me think this. True forgiveness — truly letting go the past — is not just the base on which faith, hope and charity stand, but also one other virtue: joy.
The atrocities of the world are very great. If you are fortunate enough to come upon a place of pastoral peace, in the forests and meadows or in your own soul, you bear a responsibility to those who have suffered — to lift up your heart. It is meet and right so to do.
This is not recommended to us but required of us: Rejoice evermore!
It’s good to be home.
Dein Vater
Welcome home. I hope you were able to take a complete break and recharge.
My husband and I spent the first 18 months of our marriage in a small town in Germany. He was stationed at a small army base. We lived in an attic apartment above our landlord who had fought in WW1. Then he served in the Home Guard during WW2. So, now it was 1975, and he was in his 70s, but he was so kind to us. He was proud to have American tenants. Most all the people of that town, and in other places we traveled to, were friendly to the Americans who were still, after 30 years, a visible presence and reminder of the war. I never thought of them as the enemy, but I was born almost a decade after the war ended.