Và sự phục sinh không dứt của sự thiện, chứ không phải của sự dữ và độc ác, cho chúng ta thấy chân lý về thế giới và cuộc đời của chúng ta. Nhà văn Do Thái-Hungari, Imre Kertesz, đã đoạt giải Nobel Văn học năm 2002, đã có một chứng tá thâm thúy về điều này. Ông từng là một cậu bé trong trại giết người của Đức Quốc xã, nhưng điều ông nhớ nhất về quãng thời gian này, không phải là những bất công, tàn ác, và cái chết mà ông chứng kiến ở đó, nhưng là những hành động nhân ái, trìu mến và vị tha giữa sự dữ. Vì thế sau chiến tranh, ông mong muốn đọc hạnh các thánh hơn là tiểu sử các tội phạm chiến tranh. Vẻ ngoài của sự thiện lôi cuốn ông. Với ông, có thể hiểu được sự dữ, còn sự thiện thì sao? Ai có thể giải thích được? Nguồn cội sự thiện là gì? Tại sao sự thiện cứ tuôn ra, tuôn tràn trở lại trên khắp cõi trái đất, trong mọi tình trạng thế nào chăng nữa?

http://ronrolheiser.com/the-triumph-of-goodness/#.Vv8aYjZzY5s

And it is this, the constant resurrection of goodness, not that of viciousness and evil, which speaks the deepest truth about our world and our lives. The Jewish-Hungarian writer, Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, gives a poignant testimony of this. He had as a young boy been in a Nazi death camp, but what he remembered most afterwards from this experience was not the injustice, cruelty, and death that he saw there, but rather some acts of goodness, kindness, and altruism he witnessed amidst that evil. After the war, it left him wanting to read the lives of saints rather than biographies of war. The appearance of goodness fascinated him. To his mind, evil is explicable, but goodness? Who can explain it? What is its source? Why does it spring up over and over again all over the earth, and in every kind of situation?

It springs up everywhere because God’s goodness and power lie at the source of all being and life. This is what is revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. What the resurrection reveals is that the ultimate source of all that is, of all being and life, is gracious, good, and loving. Moreover it also reveals that graciousness, goodness, and love are the ultimate power inside reality. They will have the final word and they will never be captured, derailed, killed, or ultimately ignored. They will break through, ceaselessly, forever. In the end, too, as Imre Kertesz suggests, they are more fascinating than evil.

The Triumph of Goodness

March 28, 2016

The stone which rolled away from the tomb of Jesus continues to roll away from every sort of grave. Goodness cannot be held, captured, or put to death. It evades its pursuers, escapes capture, slips away, hides out, even leaves the churches sometimes, but forever rises, again and again, all over the world. Such is the meaning of the resurrection.

Goodness cannot be captured or killed. We see this already in the earthly life of Jesus. There are a number of passages in the Gospels which give the impression that Jesus was somehow highly elusive and difficult to capture. It seems that until Jesus consents to his own capture, nobody can lay a hand on him. We see this played out a number of times: Early on in his ministry, when his own townsfolk get upset with his message and lead him to the brow of a hill to hurl him to his death, we are told that “he slipped through the crowd and went away.” Later when the authorities try to arrest him we are told simply that “he slipped away”. And, in yet another incident when he is in temple area and they try to arrest him, the text simply says that he left the temple area and “no one laid a hand upon him because his hour had not yet come.” Why the inability to take him captive? Was Jesus so physically adept and elusive that no one could imprison him?

These stories of his “slipping away” are highly symbolic. The lesson is not that  Jesus was physically deft and elusive, but rather that the word of God, the grace of God, the goodness of God, and power of God can never be captured, held captive, or ultimately killed. They are adept. They can never be held captive, can never be killed, and even when seemingly they are killed, the stone that entombs them always eventually rolls back and releases them. Goodness continues to resurrect from every sort of grave.

And it is this, the constant resurrection of goodness, not that of viciousness and evil, which speaks the deepest truth about our world and our lives. The Jewish-Hungarian writer, Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, gives a poignant testimony of this. He had as a young boy been in a Nazi death camp, but what he remembered most afterwards from this experience was not the injustice, cruelty, and death that he saw there, but rather some acts of goodness, kindness, and altruism he witnessed amidst that evil. After the war, it left him wanting to read the lives of saints rather than biographies of war. The appearance of goodness fascinated him. To his mind, evil is explicable, but goodness? Who can explain it? What is its source? Why does it spring up over and over again all over the earth, and in every kind of situation?

It springs up everywhere because God’s goodness and power lie at the source of all being and life. This is what is revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. What the resurrection reveals is that the ultimate source of all that is, of all being and life, is gracious, good, and loving. Moreover it also reveals that graciousness, goodness, and love are the ultimate power inside reality. They will have the final word and they will never be captured, derailed, killed, or ultimately ignored. They will break through, ceaselessly, forever. In the end, too, as Imre Kertesz suggests, they are more fascinating than evil.

And so we are in safe hands. No matter how bad the news on a given day, no matter how threatened our lives are on a given day, no matter how intimidating the neighborhood or global bully, not matter how unjust and cruel a situation, and no matter how omnipotent are anger and hatred, love and goodness will reappear and ultimately triumph.

Jesus taught that the source of all life and being is benign and loving. He promised too that our end will be benign and loving. In the resurrection of Jesus, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise. Goodness and love will triumph! The ending of our story, both that of our world and that of our individual lives, is already written – and it is a happy ending!  We are already saved. Goodness is guaranteed. Kindness will meet us. We only need to live in the face of that wonderful truth.

They couldn’t arrest Jesus, until he himself allowed it. They put his dead body in a tomb and sealed it with a stone, but the stone rolled away. His disciples abandoned him in his trials, but they eventually returned more committed than ever. They persecuted and killed his first disciples, but that only served to spread his message. The churches have been unfaithful sometimes, but God just slipped away from those particular temple precincts. God has been declared dead countless time, but yet a billion people just celebrated Easter.

Goodness cannot be killed. Believe it!

Tks. NQT

Trong bài ai điếu trên Guardian, viết:

Tác phẩm của K. đôi khi ló ra cái hàm hồ của ông, về tín ngưỡng, khiến đôi khi ông không tin có Thượng Đế.
Trong tác phẩm Gályanapló, ông đi 1 đường nghịch thiên, ngược ngạo:
Thượng Đế có ở Lò Thiêu. Người ném tôi vô đó, để kể (“bao giờ thì tôi có thể “lại viết”, của TTT, là ở chỗ này) lại cho Người nghe, Người đã làm gì ở đó!

Kertész’s books also sometimes betrayed his ambivalent relationship with religion, which at times led him to doubt the existence of God. In his work Gályanapló (Galley Boat-Log, 1992) he chose a paradox to express his doubts: “God is Auschwitz, but also He who brought me out of there, who obliged, even compelled me to give an account of all that there happened, because He wants to know and hear what he had done.”
Often tempted by suicide, Kertész somehow persevered and it was not until 2003 in his novel Felszámolás (Liquidation, 2003) that he produced a hero who actually kills himself. The ending to that book was probably influenced by his recurring depression after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In 2014, having lived in Berlin for a number of years, Kertész moved back to Budapest, ostensibly for medical treatment.

---

 
 ‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” wrote the German critic Theodor Adorno soon after the second world war. He later modified his statement by saying: “The main question is: can we go on living after Auschwitz?” This was the problem with which the Nobel prize-winning Hungarian Jewish writer Imre Kertész, a survivor of the Holocaust, grappled throughout his life and literary work, until his death at the age of 86.
Kertész’s first and most influential novel, Sorstalanság (Fatelessness, 1975), is the story of a 14-year-old boy, Gyuri Köves, who survives deportation to Auschwitz and captivity in Buchenwald, and, on his return to Hungary, finds it impossible to relate his experiences to his surviving family. The book was at first hardly noticed by Hungarian critics and only became a success many years later once it had been translated into German and then, in 2005, made into a film by the Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai. While lacking the biting irony of Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, Sorstalanság differs from most accounts of Nazi concentration camps in its relentless objectivity, and as such is a unique achievement of its kind.
It was mainly on the strength of this book, followed by two more novels: A Kudarc (The Failure, 1988) and Kaddis a Meg Nem Született Gyermekért (Kaddish for an Unborn Child, 1990), that Kertész was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2002.
Kertész was born in Budapest, into a lower-middle-class family. From 1938 laws had been introduced that curtailed the freedom of Hungarian Jews, but the situation changed dramatically in March 1944, when Adolf Hitler invaded the country. Unable to continue his schooling, Kertész, aged 14, was forced to work as a manual labourer. A few months later, he was held in a round up of Budapest Jews and deported to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, where he survived the war. 
 
He returned to Hungary to complete his studies and gain his high school certificate in 1948, and for several years worked as a journalist for the journal Világosság (Clarity). After a spell as a factory worker, he found a position in the press department of the ministry of heavy industry, and from 1953 onwards he was a freelance journalist and translator of literature, in particular of the works of German language writers and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, Elias Canetti, Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Kertész struggled to get his first novel published in the restrictive atmosphere of Hungary’s communist regime, partly due to his focus on the problem of Jewish identity and its consequences. In Kaddis, the narrator is asked by his wife whether they could have a child. The answer is “no”, because as a survivor of the Holocaust Kertész’s hero finds the human condition almost unbearable. His problem is not finding a place in Hungarian society but “assimilation to life itself”. His decision not to procreate alienates his wife and the marriage breaks up.
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Kertész’s books also sometimes betrayed his ambivalent relationship with religion, which at times led him to doubt the existence of God. In his work Gályanapló (Galley Boat-Log, 1992) he chose a paradox to express his doubts: “God is Auschwitz, but also He who brought me out of there, who obliged, even compelled me to give an account of all that there happened, because He wants to know and hear what he had done.”
Often tempted by suicide, Kertész somehow persevered and it was not until 2003 in his novel Felszámolás (Liquidation, 2003) that he produced a hero who actually kills himself. The ending to that book was probably influenced by his recurring depression after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In 2014, having lived in Berlin for a number of years, Kertész moved back to Budapest, ostensibly for medical treatment.
His last book, A Végső Kocsma (The Ultimate Inn, 2014) was not a conventional novel, but an amalgam of sketches for a would-be novel allied to notes from his diaries of 2001 onwards, mainly on the subject of the decline of the west and his ambivalent feelings about contemporary Hungary, where deeply rooted antisemitic views are still rife and often displayed by unscrupulous politicians.
Kertész won numerous literary honours from 1983 onwards, including the Attila József (1989) Márai (1996) and Kossuth (1997) prizes in Hungary, where he was also appointed to the Order of St Stephen, the country’s highest distinction. He received many foreign awards and decorations, too, including the Brandenburg literature prize (1995), the Friedrich Gundolf prize (1997) and the Goethe medal (2004).
Kertész is survived by his second wife, Magda Ambrus, whom he married in 1996. His first wife, Albina Vas, died in 1995.

• Imre Kertész, writer, born 9 November 1929; died 31 March 2016


http://www.tanvien.net/cn/Trang_Kertesz.html