At this moment The Netherlands, like many other countries, are in deep mourning, shocked by the terrible news of the downing of MZ17 in the East of Ukraine. Each of us has somewhere in his or her network people who were in that flight; my faculty lost a whole family, the dean of Liberal Arts with his wife who worked in Communication Studies, and one daughter, a brilliant student who was in my Liberal Arts class last year. At this moment the news is completely dominated by images of a charred field with wreckage, masked soldiers trying to shut off the area, and especially of a long train of cooling-wagons carrying off some of the 298 remains to a safer area, in West Ukraine. At this very moment the whole of Holland is waiting for two airplanes to land at Eindhoven airport, with whatever is left of those dear corpses. A day of nation-wide mourning, this day, a day when all of us ponder on what so suddenly happened, on the losses of that many people, unimaginable, unthinkable, unexplainable. As I am writing I glance to the right where the TV shows the planes landing. At four o\u2019clock all church bells will ring in the country, the trains stop, the airspace is closed, the highways quiet. The Netherlands mourn. There both planes come, I will stop writing.
\n\tOur king and queen, the prime minister and the whole cabinet, together with the Belgian king, the Malaysian ambassador, the Australian consul-general, and many others representing the countries with victims inside that flight MZ17, they all stood silent with the rest of us, during the sounding of the Last Post that welcomed our beloved dead back home. Now the caskets are transferred by air force personnel into the long line of patiently waiting hearses, soon on the road to the Dutch Forensic Institute.
\n\tNext will be the painstaking, laborious process of identification, a grisly job that we seem to have turned into a theme for TV series. At the crash site in the East of the Ukraine experts are trying to get access, and people talk of police enforcement to create a safe working environment; those separatists have very valid reasons not to let the truth come to the surface. It is a desolate area at any time, also when I visited there a decade ago (for a sports tournament), a piece of our European Wild East that has had more than its share of strife, rebellions and war.
\nThe bells fall silent now, those wonderful huge bronze bells that have sounded over our city for the last 600 years, exhorting to prayer, sounding for disasters such as floods and storms, and proclaiming the coming of the enemies \u2013 a long list in our long history: Spain, France, England, Germany. I am, for a moment, glad that we are not all Mormons here, if only for those bells. The city of Utrecht, an old bishop city in the Middle Ages, is full of churches, all with their bells, each one their own tone and timbre, the great soundscape of mourning, a wonderful punctuation to the silence of distress.
\nAfter the grief come the questions, the persisting, ever-present, unanswerable questions, the questions that will continue to haunt us. Why? How could this happen? What can we do to prevent this from happening again? Can we find the culprits and bring them to justice? This is not an unfortunate traffic accident, it has to do with a war as the plane was shot down, so what are the implications of this tragedy for the geopolitical situation, the separatism in the Ukraine, the role of Russia or the challenge to the European Union.
\nYes, the Netherlands, with their 188 victims in that doomed plane, has now joined the ever expanding group of \u20189\/11 countries\u2019, the afflicted ones, the nations that are deeply hurt, mourn and ask questions. Ours is a quite complacent country, with its almost 70 years of uninterrupted peace after WWII \u2013 still our icon of national struggle \u2013 but it has been shaken to its core. We will have to think, to ponder, to reflect. Those questions will have to wait for the moment, but I know that we have to turn inwards to find any answer, not to the outside. Inwards into ourselves, inwards into the core of the gospel; if anywhere, the eternal questions have to resonate with the deep history of people and nations that mourn a great loss. I know that in the deepest of despair we may find the most profound truths of the gospel, experiences we can find, more than anything else in the Old Testament, in the Psalms of David, in the Book of Job, in the wonderful prophecies of Isaiah, the Lamentations of Jeremiah.
\nThat is for tomorrow, that is for another day. Thank God, the whole ceremony has been done without anyone speaking, great. For, as my Kapsiki friends in Cameroon say, in real mourning we just \u2018sit and look with our eyes\u2019. Let silence reign for a while. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At this moment The Netherlands, like many other countries, are in deep mourning, shocked by the terrible news of the downing of MZ17 in the East of Ukraine. Each of us has somewhere in his or her network people who were in that flight; my faculty lost a whole family, the dean of Liberal Arts with his wife who worked in Communication Studies, and one daughter, a brilliant student who was in my Liberal Arts class last year. At this moment the news is completely dominated by images of a charred field with wreckage, masked soldiers trying to shut off the area, and especially of a long train of cooling-wagons carrying off some of the 298 remains to a safer area, in West Ukraine. At this very moment the whole of Holland is waiting for two airplanes to land at Eindhoven airport, with whatever is left of those dear corpses. A day of nation-wide mourning, this day, a day when all of us ponder on what so suddenly happened, on the losses of that many people, unimaginable, unthinkable, unexplainable. As I am writing I glance to the right where the TV shows the planes landing. At four o\u2019clock all church […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10378,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10378"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31113,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31111\/revisions\/31113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}