With God in Solitary Confinement

Dear brothers and sisters

... When we hear the cries of someone being beaten, all the others begin to bang on their doors, crying: «Help! Help! Stop beating!» There is nobody to hear us, except those who are beating and who now, instead of beating only one, beat us all up, one alter the other. You hear the doors being unlocked. Now it is the fourth prisoner to my right. Follows the third. I have only two left. Then I hear the cries of my nearest neighbour. Only two or three minutes left - how long these minutes are - and then I will be beaten, too. What is the sense of a collective protest here? What is the sense of expressing your solidarity with those who are beaten? It is non-sense, which means that it is pure love. Love does not think about what it will achieve, what it will gain. Love does not think at all. Love does not tare about reason. Why should it?

If we are to love our enemies, why should we not love reason, that bitter critic, too? We can succeed in doing this. But we shall never persuade reason to love love. Reason considered Jesus and Paul to be madmen. My reason condemns me as mad, too.

This time I attained a paroxysm of unreasonableness. When the guards entered to give me my share of the beating I jumped at one of them and kicked him. I am so thin. They are so many. It was foolish. Reason tells me: "Christ taught you to turn the other cheek." I answer: "Shut up! I have to turn the other cheek when I am slapped, not when my brother is tortured and my whole nation is oppressed: "

Now I am punished to stay, I don’t know for how long, in a cell I have known about for some time. It is full of dozens of rats which, being hungry, jump around, not allowing me to deep.

I have just passed the first hours here. I am not tired. I watch the rats and am reminded of Heisenberg’s law of the indeterminacy of elementary particles. (How foolish to think about physics in such circumstances.) When you bail water, you know that the mass of molecules as a whole enters into quicker movement. But what each single molecule will do is unpredictable. Some continue to move at the old speed, and some even slow down their movements. I observe the same thing happening with the rats. I had thought about them as a species. But rats are also individuals, and each one has a character of its own. Some are running around looking for food which does not exist. Some are trying to gnaw the rags I have on my feet. I don’t even drive them away. Some are gnawing their own tails. Some seem litre philosophers, resigned. They sit quietly and await for their death. They have given up the search.

Dear rats! It is written: "The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God." And God gives them their meat. Sometimes he gives them as meat the bodies of his saints. And why not? If a saint eats the meat of a guiltless lamb in a religious ceremony, why should not his own turn come, and his own guiltless life be eaten up by a lion? Shouldn’t you, rats, also seek your meat from God? I used to recite in church every Sunday that God is the maker of ail things, visible and invisible. So he is your maker too, although I don’t see the slightest reason why rats should exist. But neither do the Communists see any reason why Wurmbrand should exist. God’s thoughts are not my thoughts.

Richard Wurmbrand