(Kosovo, Easter 1999)

It's the running shoes that get to me. When the massacres in Rwanda happened, I couldn't take them in: they were too big, too fast, too impossible, beyond belief. My mind understood what had happened, but my imagination, looking at the heaped dark bodies, simply blipped in shock and shut down. This is different.

The young women in these news photographs are wearing ordinary running shoes, jeans and windbreakers. I see women like these every day, in the supermarket and the Bi-Way or wheeling strollers down by the Bon Bakery. Those heavy-set middle-aged women in sweaters --I see women like them chatting on the corner by the post office downtown. Those dark-eyed children could be doing wheelies across the street from my house or firing off the final snowballs of the season. And the dead men in their running shoes and jackets, lying face-down in the dirt--they look like the guys down at the Co-op or the truck centre. That's what brings it home, makes it real.

These people like my neighbours are fleeing their neighbours, running in huge masses for a border into the unknown. They are being thrust from their own towns and villages into exile. Many of the men and older boys have disappeared, and we know what that could easily mean, from what happened before in Srebrenica. Their homes have been burned behind them, sometimes by the same people they used to nod to in the village shop. Oh, they look like my neighbours, all but for their faces: full of tears and disbelieving terror, the deep grief of loss, and the bitterest sort of betrayal.

Kosovo makes me so angry I could spit. I want to stand up and yell in my best mother-of-sons enforcer's bellow, "Dammit, I don't care WHO started this; stop it now!" Of course it wouldn't work; I'm only a middle-aged Canadian housewife with no say in these matters. But even if the Pope and Patriarch and the entire United Nations, all the powers and principalities of this world, stood up and bellowed, with one voice, STOP IT, these people wouldn't listen. They're too caught up in the fury of what they're doing. They are very far gone.

Evil is afoot in Kosovo. Evil is always afoot somewhere or other; merely, sometimes it flares like a sunspot and startles the wits out of us. Sometimes it comes home to us with a particularly hard and vividly personal thump, that's all. That's what the running shoes did to me.

Of course evil is up to its usual tricks: denying reality, blaming its victims, scapegoating, feeling sorry for itself, claiming that it's the real victim, denying that it's done anything wrong at all, confusing the issues, seizing on old grievances to justify its behaviour, self- romanticizing, pretending there is no tomorrow. Above all, evil is doing what evil always does best: flatly refusing to meet its own eyes in the mirror.

And of course, that's all wrong: evil isn't an "it". Evil has no independent existence, no life of its own. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Evil is in us all, from pauper to Pope. We can only be aware of it and, with God's help, keep it under close guard, to make sure that it doesn't harm others while we're pretending we don't know it's there.

But don't for a moment think that we aren't capable of evil. What's happening in the Balkans now shows where anyone can get to by lovingly nurturing a good grievance, by refusing to let go of past wrongs and move on, by indulging in "righteous" rage. It shows how pride in one's own group can turn into a particularly nasty sort of god. And it shows the effects of keeping God and real life in carefully separated compartments--as though God doesn't notice or care what we're up to six days of the week as long as we're in church on Sunday, making the right noises.

If you see a louse in someone else's hair, stop right there and check your own scalp for nits of the same species. . . . The Serbs are punishing the Kosovo Albanians for the sin of being Albanian, out of frustrated rage because they can't get at NATO for the bombings. We had better be extremely careful not to fall into the trap of punishing Serbs for the sin of being Serb, out of frustrated rage because we can't get at the people committing atrocities in Kosovo. It's fatally easy to start playing in the sandbox, with sandbox rules and behaviour. And that is part of the evil.

Kosovo is a big messy tangle of darkness and pain and wrongness now, and it is drawing us in where we do not want to go. We feel helpless to undo the tangle. All we can see is the hopelessness of it--all those precious new grudges and hatreds started, to be lovingly tended and handed down through the generations, proud heirlooms. Any choice we make now is apt to turn out horribly, but we also have no choice but to choose to do something. Simply standing passively by hasn't worked before.

No matter what we do, we cannot, this Easter weekend, do anything much to staunch all the suffering, except to pray like crazy and mobilize a whole lot of practical aid as fast as we can. We can't make the horror stop. We can only cry out in impotent grief for what people do to each other when they let hate and rage possess them, and for God's deep grief over the suffering of his beloved children.

And yet--and yet . . .

If the Resurrection says anything at all, it says that in the fullness of time, God indeed will have the victory. Ultimately nothing can prevail over God's love and goodness--not death, not human cruelty, not the terrible toxins of fear and old hatred. Ultimately all our cupboards will spill open and their contents tumble out into the Light. What was hidden will be exposed; what was damaged will be made whole; the hurt will be comforted, the suffering eased, and joy will backwash, transforming what seems now beyond any possible redemption.

The Resurrection says that ultimately, the Light will win out over our darkness. In the end, God's strange, to-us-incomprehensible justice will wrap us all around, whether or not we want it. God will take us all, righteous and sinners alike, and hold us gently by the shoulders and turn us around to face ourselves--to meet our own eyes in the mirror.

And then we will see what, in this life, we refused to look at, for good or ill. Then, those whose hearts are hard and bitter will have them broken, not in punishment, but so that they can learn to breathe and feel and love, maybe for the first time. Then we will finally understand our own confused, mixed-up selves. And then we will make account to our Maker for what we have made, with our own free will, of the lives God gave us.

Then God's goodness will blaze out in all its glory, as Christ blazes forth from death, victorious over the evil in us that had nailed him to the Cross. Then, in that light, we will understand so much that now seems so dark to us. Then, even Kosovo will be redeemed. We have that promise, at Easter.

That time's not yet, it seems. And so, until God's will is fully done, we have to trust, even in the face of evil, that wise Dame Julian had it right: "all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."

Sometimes, as in Kosovo this weekend, that seems impossible--out of the question. But then who, in that quiet day after the crucifixion, could possibly have expected to find what the women found when they walked back to the tomb through the clear still air, so early in the morning?