Once more, I am walking through a valley of death, its smell all over me, its taste in my mouth. All I see is fog, all I hear is lamentation. I am not alone in these shadows of darkness. The whole world seems engulfed in despair. Pointless wars, pointless tragedies, pointless suffering. As Hannah Arendt concluded regarding the Holocaust, it is futile to seek meaning in what is senseless: evil is banal.

The “banality of evil” is an insight both sobering and shattering. Sobering because it implies that evil is not something to “do” anything about. In the face of evil, creative action meets its limits. For evil, the root of all conflict, is banal because it is an absence, a chasm where our souls, made to attract and connect with one another, feel tortured – and here is the shattering part – because they cannot meet. No matter how much they try, the gulf remains unbridgeable. For no human can love or create ex nihilo … for no human can bridge that “nothingness” which life abhors.

This shattering is evident in the crude reality that is the fruit of all intense conflict: extreme suffering. There is no greater suffering than the anguish that characterises mental illness. Indeed, as the psychiatrist Gianni Francesetti argues, the very word “psychopathology” implies how, in anguish, the experience between us, that is, through the “psyche” or “breath” through which our lives and love flow, there is a desperate need for the bearing of suffering (pathos) that was unleashed.

Suffering cannot be fixed, but neither can it be ignored or suppressed. For suffering demands acknowledgement: and only when I-and-Thou are present to one another – with all the integrity and love that we can master – can suffering be bore through empathy that allows for naming the specific hurt.

Even in the unbridgeable chasm of evil, hope can breathe life into the driest of bones

This truth was made palpable to me through a recent experience that, while like conflict in being of both ‘chasm’ and ‘suffering’, is also its contrary. My family recently lost a loved one in the all-too-natural experience of death. But, as our loved one taught us, the chasm of death can become a new bridge of presence-in-absence, and the suffering of loss can become the wisdom of love-in-grief.

While traumatic, the passageway between life-and-death – like that between womb-and-world – also promises healing through grace. Consoling peace and joyful memory become the bond between the living and their departed ones.

Not so with conflict, where the chasm is crafted by hardened hearts and the suffering is the fruit of frailty of discernment and blinded perception. Evil is the progeny of the “father of lies” and its banality begins with the denial of reality: the beauty of life and love celebrated through relationship.

Still, acceptance of the inevitability of death has much to teach about the sinful tragedy of conflict: in both, suffering demands bearing, but the Christian attestation is that Christ has borne all suffering, bridging the chasm of evil. When two or more gather in his name, we are assured that we do not bear suffering alone. And like the hope of consoling peace after loss, conflict resolution too becomes, not a ‘doing’ but a trusting – that even in the unbridgeable chasm of evil, hope can breathe life into the driest of bones.

nadia.delicata@maltadiocese.org

Nadia Delicata is episcopal delegate for evangelisation of the Malta archdiocese