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Home > Sacraments > Eucharist > Communion reflections > 27 04 2008 - The things we fail to do |
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The things we fail to do Often we think we are good simply because we are not conscious of doing any great evil. But what about the things we fail to do? Solzhenitsyn recalls, as he says, ‘with shame’, an incident he witnessed at the front when he was a captain in the Russian army. ‘One day I saw a sergeant of the secret police, on horseback, using a whip on a Russian soldier who had been captured serving in a German unit. The man, naked from the waist up, was staggering under the blows, his body covered in blood. Suddenly, he saw me and cried out: “Mister Captain, save me!” ‘Any officer in any army in the world should have put a stop to this torture, but I was a coward. I said nothing and I did nothing. This picture has remained in my mind ever since’. ‘Be not simply good’, says Thoreau, ‘be good for something’. |
