There are days that you would never have wished for the earth!
There are days that etched itself into the mind and will always be there!
Things are happening in the world which is so bedærvede, stupid and evil, and leaves people with a lively sense of powerlessness!
Most of us felt the other day Friday.
The wild powerlessness reaching for harsh words, persuasive words, angry words.
Would not most of us have almost swung his fists at the sky and asked, however, there just might undes us a shred of meaning in the meaningless!
The answer was silence - or rather: a scream!
In one of the many reports are heard a frightened man's desperate screams! That cry has been echoed in many minds.
Whether you believe or not believe - is one thing we share, and it is feeling that now we must be careful with words. Now everything threatens to become hollow, superficial, trivial.
The world seems deprived of its deepest meaning for a while - that godforsaken.
How can we find the words that will sound, the colors that gives horizons, the tones that sounds?
How dare we speak again of hope in a world where madness has manifested itself so horrible?
Most people admit that the idea that the world would be god-forsaken them are familiar, and therefore we are appalled and hunted by meaninglessness. Our eyes scout for love, freedom, equality and fairness heart!
Suddenly it is as if out of the lake rises a country. It rises from the sea with beautiful contours. It is lined and it is weathered, but the country has a dream with him - not a nightmare!
The Norwegian is to know that there probably is nothing that stirs admiration, wonder and longing in Danish mind that mountain - the proud land mass that rises toward the clouds. The Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen describes the mountain, so there is no doubt about that mountain is more than rock! It stands there and stands there and does not move an inch and people can put their anguished foreheads against the rock wall and get rest and coolness.
The mountain stood there, as they hammered a poor fixed to the cross and while the big heads, which did not provide a thought that had power. It stood under the concentration camps and Hiroshima. It stands as a landmark of death, turmoil and perhaps hoped. It reads the stars. Something old. Something you can hold onto and cooling his forehead on.
Such rock is the Beatitudes.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, blessed are the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted.
Well, it is because otherwise the people there is great demand and the status to be coveted worthy!
But it is Jesus' radical message of love. Power, the real power, that is the one who creates the opening for the free spirit, the one that opens my mind to his fellow man, it makes me understand and acknowledge that I am part of a larger whole - the power is completely different than the power to dictate prohibits murder.
Czechoslovakia's first president Masaryk, put it clearly when he argued that the principle of power would not be Caesar, then emperor, the oppressor, the undisputed, but Jesus. Power should be anything but subtle intrigues and maneuvering art. Power must be the Spirit that radiates love and longing for community - it must be a drift towards shared happiness - a walk away from violence, vanity, ambition and selfishness.
We'll have to face it that democracy is despised by some people. Large parts of the political struggle in the 20.årh. was about democracy or another dream, like most of us in our context, consider a nightmare: the totalitarian society.
I do not know where the idea comes from that no man could have as much right, and be as clear sighted that he must be without contradiction, be beyond discussion.
We need to protect our way of being in society!
We need to insist on openness, free thought, tolerance and compassion for an opponent. We believe that opinions must be broken. The adversary should not be hated. Democracy's lifeblood is the conversation, discussion, and of course the right to demonstrate.
What would become of us if we accepted the totalitarian man's anger against the adversary and contempt for fellow human beings? We have just witnessed the contempt for fellow human beings, anger and rage leaves.
"Love your enemies, pray for your opponents," Jesus had said to the disciples. We need to nurture ourselves stuck in the impossible art and show reverence for the opponent, because we will not end up in their shrill rhetoric and become obsessed with the pettiness and bigotry, tyranny and ugliness, political and human callousness!
Terror and horror that unfolded in Oslo and at Utøya on Friday, leaving many people with indescribable pain, and we, the immediate family, can only cry and ask us next to and hum along in hope tunes, maybe some a comforting hand or send a warm look, put a flower, light a candle, pray God reveal His love, especially in the desperate and anguished hearts.
With grief as a companion, we will go into the future, and we would hope - we will stubbornly hope that faith imagination will liberate humanity, community, compassion, courage, joy, jubilation.
We will persistently yearn for a new heaven and a new earth - and we will dream about it quite another and quite different - that he is healed and met people where they were and we would hope that our dream is echoed in acts against community.
Let us meanwhile be challenged by the mountain of Jesus.
In captivity, wrote the Norwegian poet Arnulf Øverland in 1942 poetry collection: We will survive everything.
He was not so enthusiastic about the church, which he felt had delivered its contribution of gossip and hypocrisy, but he had a unique sense of Jesus. In the poem HE WHO MUST COME expresses Øverland dream of completely different - that is about the Savior who would die if tømmersvenden went into bad company, if spotteord toward the cross when he was executed - and the dream: that he, Jesus would come again .
And then he leaps up to the present and write about when strangers have in the kingdom, and sons, fathers and wives indicate men when roads are deserted and dark full of screaming when the killers head high with the neck and the air you breathe is the stench - and there in the middle in the horror - in the middle of the dark - in the middle of captivity, he describes Jesus as the culmination of hope:
We know him yet.
We do not know who he is.
He wears no crown.
He leads no army.
We perceive only a silence:
Now he is near!
It was indeed a very warm and heartfelt service.
