This captured my heart.
“The little room, like much of Sri Lanka, could hold no more grief. All day on Monday, through the steamy heat, mourners quietly stepped inside and paused in front of a sealed coffin containing what was left of Sneha Savindi Fernando.”
“Sneha was 11 years old and standing in line for communion at Easter Mass on Sunday when she was blown apart.”
“Why did you leave me? her grandmother cried, sitting in front of the coffin and rubbing its sides, with anguish in her eyes. “There are so many bad people in the world, Why kill the innocents?””
It is said that the smallest coffins are the heaviest. And the weight is made more unbearable when the passing is caused by senseless violence triggered by grown men on the pettiest of emotions.
Appparently, revenge was the motive.
Sri Lanka’s State Minister of Defence Ruwan Wijewardene “told Parliament yesterday that initial investigations had revealed that Sunday’s explosions were executed by local extremist group National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTI) in retaliation for the Christchurch attacks in New Zealand last month.”
It truly boggles the mind and heart as to how the two events are even related. One was committed by a self-declared ultranationalistic, white supremacist who had no religious affiliation or profession, and very much a loner.
However, the Sri Lankan’s multiple bombings on Easter Sunday was a mindless violence perpetrated by fighters believed to be affiliated to ISIS.
If you think that religion was the common link, I beg to defer. It is easy to scapegoat religion as the culprit that fueled the carnage and fury. And we have a long history of how the name of religion was used for all kinds of self-driven, self-enriching acts of brutality and inhumanity.
It has to be said that such violence can only be carried out by men who are blind to the scream and cries of their victims.
The death of innocent girls and boys does not even move them in the slightest. They go by a self-proselytising rage that is sightless. It is a heart so conditioned by an altered ego beyond common reason that unmitigated rage takes over the other human senses in their body.
Their eyes see only hatred. They smell only revenge. Their mouth is a bugle call for ruthless vindication. And they hear only what they want to hear; neither reason nor pleas of the innocent, but an all-consuming lust for power, control and self-preservation.
But, by saying all that, I am surely not stripping these people of the humanity that is common to us all. Their acts are without doubt inhumane, but if they think that what they have done is in any way special and unique (or god forbid, enlightened) as if it was a divine mandate from some otherworldly sources, they cannot be anymore wrong or misguided.
It is therefore not religion that undergirds their depravity, but an extreme self-delusion that plunges them far below the standards of humanity (but not out of its scope or imagination as history has witnessed equally depraved acts, if not worse).
In fact, to settle at such dark depth of humanity only shows that they have effectively surrendered to the worst version of themselves. Their warped egos would tell them otherwise, but such vain persuasion only worsen their delusion further with little or no hope for personal redemption.
Alas, I can only go back to the coffin of little Sneha, who became one of the innocent victims of this pervasively dark humanity. I can only look to the restoration of Sri Lanka after this carnage.
And as with the mindless violence that has left a nation and the world speechless, I can only pray that the aftermath of resilience, hope and unity of hearts will bring about a force of humanity so infectious, encouraging and empowering that it will far exceed (even overwhelm) the one that has threatened to destroy us all.
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