Resistance

Resistance (the book of Revelation)

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.” Jacques Ellul

 

A letter from Christ to

his resistance army

Stiffening a community under

Extreme pressure

Failing, hurting, accommodating, fleeing, the call goes out

Stand Firm

 

Eschatological. A vision held before eyes in need of salve.

Apocalypse of hope. Unveiling secrets long hid, but needed

for diamond creating Neroesque persecution

 

The vision (that hurts the eyes) is not

steak on your plate while you wait,

nor pie in the sky when you die, but

stand for the lamb while you can

 

Issuing to and from a community of faith

already hope-filled

And called back to

Carry on in the hope

they have already been granted

 

(Pete Wilcox lecture on Revelation as resistance literature 11.1.17 – outside Auchwitz)

THIS SERIES OF POST ARE POETRY WRITTEN AT AUSCHWITZ-BERKENAU DURING A RETREAT 75 YEARS AFTER GAS WAS FIRST USED IN THE ‘FINAL SOLUTION’ TO EXTERMINATE THE JEWS.

THE GROUP WAS LED BY SOME REMARKABLE PEOPLE, INCLUDING A GERMAN RC PRIEST, FR MANFRED WHO HAD REMAINED THERE FOR 25+ YEARS SINCE WRITING HIS PHD ON THE HOLOCAUST.

BIBLE REFLECTIONS WERE GIVEN BY SAM WELLS AND PETE WILCOX, AND WHEN POETRY OWES ITS ORIGINS TO THEIR LECTURES THEY ARE CREDITED AS SUCH.