Week VI • Thursday
Bosnia: Lament
Week VI • Thursday
Voices from the Landscape
Over the years I have learned how difficult it is to hold my own wounds alongside the wounds of others. Encountering another’s trauma can expose the limits of our empathy and the need for humility. Nowhere was this clearer to me than during a life-changing visit to Bosnia, listening to survivors of the genocide whose stories were far beyond anything my life had prepared me to carry.
This reflection can only gesture toward what was shared. To listen in Bosnia meant not only hearing the voices of women and men who survived unthinkable violence, but also listening inward – allowing their truth to re-shape the proportions of my own griefs and anxieties. Their stories became a sacred trust that demanded deep, patient listening.
The war in Bosnia is well-documented; I will not restate what others have described. Instead, I turn to one place where the memory of the dead still cries out: the Podrinje Identification Project in Tuzla.
Nothing prepared me for that room. Not the rows of sealed plastic bags stacked from floor to ceiling, each filled with the clothing of unnamed victims. Not the cardboard boxes of bones marked with numbers and unfamiliar words. It was the smell — a smell that clung to the air and to the eyes of the man who spoke to us. Death has a smell; I have known it before. But this was different. This was the lingering scent of mass death, of lives brutally taken and scattered, awaiting the mercy of identification.
On a metal tray lay bones arranged like a jigsaw puzzle, except this was the incomplete body of a small child. This child had been found in pieces, dismembered and dispersed across multiple graves as perpetrators tried to erase identity and truth. Recovering him meant searching in more than one place — kilometre after kilometre — so that one grieving family might someday know where to lay him to rest.
Around this project, I could feel the weight of waiting: mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, lovers — all holding vigil for the impossible hope that their beloved might be found. Their waiting is a human lament that stretches across years.
It is, in its own way, a Lenten waiting: a vigil in the shadow of death, longing for a resurrection that can never undo the past, yet still hoping for the dignity of truth.
Simon Robinson,
Dean of Truro UK
wonderings
- I wonder what it means to remember truthfully when memory itself feels dangerous or unbearable.
- I wonder how God is present in places where human dignity has been shattered, and where hope seems impossible.
- I wonder where my own community carries unresolved or unspoken wounds – and what it would mean to face them with compassion.
- I wonder how the mothers, sisters, and grandmothers
Reflection
God is not found in the triumphs of history but in the places where humanity breaks. Bosnia confronts us with this truth in its most painful form. Standing before the bones of a child in Tuzla, we enter what Johann Baptist Metz called dangerous memory: the kind of memory that refuses to allow suffering to be forgotten or sanitised, and insists that theology begin in solidarity with the victims.
In the face of such horror, Dorothee Sölle warned against any God who stands aloof or serene. For her, true faith rejects both resignation and sentimentality. God is not the explanation for suffering but the One who suffers-with – the One who cries in the mothers who wait, the One who laments in the unburied bones, the One whose presence is known as protest against injustice. Bosnia becomes a place where theology must be honest enough to weep.
The cross, the death of Jesus , is not an event outside human history but God’s identification with all victims of violence. In this light, the scattered remains of Srebrenica become a continuation of Good Friday: Christ crucified again in the bodies of men and boys destroyed by hatred. Yet God’s solidarity is not passive. The resurrection is God’s refusal to let the final word belong to those who deal in death. Even in Bosnia, hope is possible – not as forgetting, but as the stubborn conviction that every life lost is held in the eternal memory of God.
For the theologian Hans Küng, reconciliation is credible only when truth is told without distortion, and when every victim is honoured without exception. Bosnia forces Europe to confront its own failures, its complicity, its silence. But grace begins precisely here: in the courage to remember truthfully, to mourn without evasion, and to rebuild a future rooted not in denial but in justice.
So as people of faith we stand with the mothers who still wait, believing with them that God is found not in power, but in compassion; not in victory, but in the long, hard labour of truth, memory, and peace.
prayer
Bože sjećanja i milosrđa,
ti čuvaš svaku priču koju svijet pokušava sakriti.
Budi blizu svima koji čekaju istinu,
svima koji tuguju za onim što se ne može vratiti,
i svima koji rade za mir utemeljen na pravdi.
Daj nam hrabrosti da se suočimo
s patnjom bez bježanja,
i srca dovoljno ponizna da učimo
od onih koji nose dublje rane.
Izliječi slomljena mjesta u Evropi i u svijetu,
i učini nas oruđem tvoje samilosti.
Amen.
God of memory and mercy,
you hold every story that the world tries to bury.
Be present with all who wait for truth,
all who mourn what cannot be restored,
and all who labour for a peace grounded in justice.
Give us courage to face suffering
without turning away,
and hearts humble enough to learn from those who carry deeper wounds than our own.
Heal the broken places of Europe and the world,
and make us instruments of your compassion.
bible reading
John 14:15–31.
Peace Not as the World Gives
On the night before his arrest, Jesus speaks softly to his friends. The upper room, filled with shadows and questions, becomes a place of tenderness and promise. He tells them he is leaving, but not leaving them alone. The Spirit, the Advocate, will come – not as a visitor from outside, but as love dwelling within. This is part of the final conversations, the farewell discourse, not of withdrawal but of deepening intimacy. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” It is a peace born of relationship, not circumstance; the peace of presence within absence, trust within uncertainty.
Ain this Gospel , the Spirit is not a vague comforter but the continuing presence of Jesus – the very life of God breathed into human hearts. Rowan Williams calls the Spirit “the breath of mutuality,” the love that flows between Father and Son and now moves between God and humanity. To receive the Spirit is to live reconciled: reconciled to God who abides in us, to one another whom we are called to love, and to ourselves in our complexity and fear.
This is penance and peace woven together – repentance as openness, forgiveness as belonging.
“If you love me, keep my commandments.” These words are not a demand but an invitation. Penance here is not a grim reckoning but the daily practice of turning toward relationship. To keep the commandment is to keep company with Christ, to orient one’s life toward love. It is the slow work of conscience awakened by the Spirit, reshaping self-interest into compassion. In every generation, disciples learn this turning again – when they speak truth after years of silence, when communities apologise for harm, when families begin to listen where once they judged.
The peace Jesus promises is not escape but a living it out, an indwelling . It does not remove sorrow; it walks through it. Stephen Cherry writes that forgiveness is not the cancellation of pain but its transformation – the grace to “walk through it differently.” The Spirit makes this possible. Peace comes not by forgetting wounds but by letting them breathe, by discovering that God’s love is already there within the ache. In a hospital chaplain’s quiet presence beside a dying patient, in a truth-telling circle where victims and offenders speak face to face, in the holding of a refugee child at a border crossing – the Spirit’s peace moves silently, tenderly, through fear.
Jesus contrasts his peace with the world’s peace. Pax Romana meant order through control; modern peace too often means the silence of the conquered or the comfort of the privileged. Christ’s peace is different .It is freedom through communion. It dismantles the ego and restores relationship. Across Europe the Spirit still breathes this reconciling work: in the songs of Taizé where language and denomination dissolve into harmony; in the patient ecumenical friendships of Iona; in shared prayers between Muslims and Christians in Sarajevo; in the courage of Ukrainian and Russian believers who refuse hatred. These are places where peace is not imposed but practised – the Spirit teaching people how to live together within difference.
The disciples’ world was about to fall apart, yet Jesus told them not to be afraid. The Advocate would come as teacher, reminder, reconciler. To remember, in the Spirit’s way, is not nostalgia but transformation – recalling what Christ said so that his words become flesh in us. The Church, when faithful, is meant to be that memory embodied: a people who breathe peace rather than fear.
The peace Jesus leaves is not stillness without struggle, but trust within change.
It is costly peace – peace that draws us, as Rowan Williams says, “into the vulnerability of God himself.” To receive it is to let go of fear, to open our lives to the breath of divine compassion, and to become instruments of that same reconciling love.
reflective action
Light a single candle today.
Sit with it in silence.
Imagine the families in Bosnia who waited years – some decades – for the truth about their loved ones.
Let their waiting shape your prayer.
“Teach me to remember with honesty, to lament without fear, and to hope without forgetting.”
When the candle is extinguished, commit to one simple act that honours truth – a conversation, a prayer, a gesture of peace.
journalling prompt
Think of a story of suffering – personal, communal, or historical – that continues to shape you or your community.
What emotions rise when you remember it?
What truths remain difficult to face?
How might God be calling you to hold this memory with honesty rather than avoidance,
and with compassion rather than despair?
As you write or draw , let the memory speak without forcing resolution.
Honour the truth that emerges.
