Yesterday, I wrote about my experience of watching a production of the Diary of Anne Frank.  Today, the play still very much on my mind, I think about an observation of French philosopher Theodor Adorno who, writing about the Holocaust, said, "The Holocaust means that we cannot forget memory."  Although the memory of the Holocaust can be highly debilitating, he noted, it is a memory which actually revives and strengthens.
     Adorno is right on here.  We all have things in our lives that we would like to forget. On the other hand, there are things that have happened to us, things whose impact has been so profoundly painful and negative that they in fact produce positive returns for us, as well as our fellow human beings.  The few Holocaust survivors who still walk the earth live as daily reminders to the rest of us of the necessity of all memory, good, bad, or otherwise, in that it is often the most awful remembrances that yield the richest of present return.  While we certainly do not say this in the midst of the experiences that produce these memories, when I listen to Holocaust survivors recount their experience, then reflect on their lives today, I realize that I am hearing people who have been to a hell, an earthly hell beyond imagination, and back--and are still here to tell us about it. They know, know in the most profound sense, deeply and clearly and passionately, in ways the rest of us simply cannot.
     Nor would some of us want to.  So we stand in awe before a God who, in the person of Jesus Christ, endured the Cross.