Things I've learned from Jacques Lusseyran

Light and Truth  found within the walls of Buchenwald:

It's not what a man has but what he is that makes the difference in happiness.  

"We had our poor and our rich at Buchenwald as they have everywhere.  Only you couldn't recognize them by their clothes or their decorations...The rich were the ones who did not think of themselves, or only rarely, for a minute or two in an emergency.  They were the ones who had given up the ridiculous notion that the concentration camp was the end of everything, a piece of hell, an unjust punishment, a wrong done them which they had not deserved."

Joy comes from inner light, not outer circumstances.   

"I had never lived so fully before."

Our difficulties often have higher purposes:  

"Sickness had rescued me from fear, it had even rescued me from death."  

In the end Life conquers over death and evil whether we live on here or in another place.

"Life had become a substance within me.  It broke into my cage, pushed by a force a thousand times stronger than I.  It was certainly not made of flesh and blood, not even of ideas.  It came towards me like a shimmering wave, like the caress of light. I could see it beyond ,my eyes and my forehead and above my head.  It touched me and filled me to overflowing.  I let myself float upon it."  

Faith connects us to the Source of Life:

"There were names which I mumbled from the depths of my astonishment.  No doubt my lips did not speak them, but they had their own song: Providence, the Guardian Angel, Jesus Christ, God."  I didn't try to turn it over in my mind.  It was not just the time for metaphysics.  I drew my strength from the spring.  I kept on drinking and drinking still more.  I was not going to leave that celestial stream.  For that matter it was not strange to me, having come to me right after my old accident when I found I was blind.  Here was the same thing all over again, the Life which sustained the life in me."

We can do many things of ourselves but in the end we need divinity:

"It is true I was quite unable to help myself.  All of us are incapable of helping ourselves...But there was one thing left which I could do; not refuse God's help, the breath he was blowing upon me.  That was the one battle I had to fight, hard and wonderful all at once." 

It is estimated that over 56,000 people died at Buchenwald.  I chose the artistic picture above for my post but it does not represent the horror that went on there.  Of the 2000 Frenchmen incarcerated with Jacques Lusseyran that day in January of 1944 only 30 survived.

How amazing that even from the most horrific of events in the earth's history, light and truth can surface and lend it's strength to us who struggle even in freedom and material prosperity.