You are listening to Outlandish and Sami Yusuf perform "Try Not to Cry".
This is a song of love, compassion and solace for all the children of the world suffering from war, occupation, oppression and indifference, made all the more somber as we approach Christmas, the birth of the Divine Child, sent to bring Light to the dark world.
Children were especially close to the heart of the Incarnate Christ once Jesus had fully grown and been baptized into the Holy Spirit. As He went about preaching the Word, Jesus said "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me." Remember those words.
Hundreds of thousands of children have been slain, maimed, beaten, starved, abandoned, orphaned, sexually abused, expolited, enslaved, turned into child-soldiers, and on and on in just this year alone. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, to name some of the major conflicts, have been particularly gruesome for children. What does this translate into in the light of Christ's passage above?
Ironically, some of the worst murderers of Christ are countries that pretend to be Christian, such as the United States, Great Britain, Ethiopia, which are, as I write, employing artillery strikes, air strikes and military engagements that inevitably hit civilian communities or random civilian victims, including children. Moreover, war creates circumstances that traumatize, terrorize and deprive children in these war zones of hope, health, education, and even food and shelter.
But the murder of Christ in the external world is but the result of the murder of Christ in each and every one of our internal worlds. A psychiatrist explained it to me once decades ago, how society takes every very young child, each of them a beautiful child of God, and begins to imprison that child behind bars of denigration, punishment, rejection and/or conditional love, entrapping the body in a coffin of repressed emotions, as the living essence within that child growing into an adolescent is met with painful prohibitions against being itself or expressing itself, including sexually ultimately, for sexuality connects one to Nature and the Cosmos in the most fundamental way. In a word, one becomes armored, armored against one's own feelings and emotions.
Eventually one grows into a socially adjusted and rigid mannequin of the State, to lesser or greater degree, going through the motions of living while actually feeling dead or alienated on the inside, quite divorced from the divinity within, the Christ-essence within. Having lost this core essence, it is an easy step to become a mechanistic automation of the State, nowhere more manifest than in the Armed Forces of a country, where this rigidity, this armoring, is taken to its ultimate extremity both physically and psychologically, where one is now expected to blindly kill, and kill, and kill when so ordered, creating actual rigor mortis in one's victims.
The opposite of the living Christ within us is death and contraction. A nation or people that actually worships war is a culture that worships the annihilation of the life force, a death culture, in a word.
The great psychosomatic pioneer, Wilhelm Reich, actually wrote a book on this subject, entitled The Murder of Christ (1953) (available at Amazon.com). Counterpunch Online Magazine actually reprinted Chapter 14 of this profound work back in 2002, the chapter entitled Gethsemane. Here is an excerpt:
Christ is Life. And Christ was manhandled just as Life was manhandled long before him and long after the crucifixion and is still manhandled today.
And all his admirers fled and forsook him while he was captured, just as they all had fallen asleep again and again before he was taken and while he went through the agony of the innocent one in supreme distress.
And even his God seemed to have abandoned him. But Life within had not abandoned him. His Life within kept acting as Life acts, up till the last breath. And this is so because God is Life within and without. God did not abandon him at all, except as an image of misled men, corresponding to no reality.
Life had known who would deliver it to its enemies. It had known it for a very long time. It saw the traitor step up to it and kiss it on the cheek as he still said, " Master! "
And this, again, is the plague.
Christ's story has moved and stirred humanity to tears and sorrow and great art because it is humanity's own tragic story. Men are Christs and victims of the plague, helpless before their own courts and fleeing disciples and sleeping admirers and Judases kissing the Master with a kiss of death, and Marys who give Christ a forbidden, godly love, and deadened bodies that seek in vain God's sweetness in their frozen limbs, but never cease to sense his presence within and without themselves. Men, basically, in spite of all armoring and sin and hate and perversion, are living beings who cannot help but feel the Force of Life within themselves and without themselves.
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