Today the 2010 Nobel Prizes were given, and the prize for peace awarded to Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese poet and literary critic now serving an eleven-year prison sentence in the People’s Republic of China for his pro-democracy activities.
Xiaobo is not a Christian (at least I could not find any evidence that he is). What to make, therefore, of several Christian references in an extract from one of his poems reprinted on the op-ed page of the New York Times, “Experiencing Death”?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/opinion/09liu.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
He speaks of fleeing the era of Christ’s birth, of being unable to face the “blinding vision on the cross”:
Faraway place
I’ve exiled my life to
this place without sun
to flee the era of Christ’s birth
I cannot face the blinding vision on the cross
From a wisp of smoke to a little heap of ash
I’ve drained the drink of the martyrs, sense spring’s
about to break into the brocade-brilliance of myriad flowers
Then later, he speaks of not experiencing death again once having died; this strikes me as an allusion to Romans 6:
Even if I know
death’s a mysterious unknown
being alive, there’s no way to experience death
and once dead
cannot experience death again
yet I’m still
hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares
I cannot pretend to understand the inwardness of Chinese poetry. But Xiaobo’s words did arrest me and raise a question. We speak so easily and frequently of life and death in our Christian prayer and liturgy. Do we domesticate it? The poet’s vision, the outsider’s insight, the word from prison—spoken by a non-believer—may help believers to regain a sense of the awful power of the story we often tell so glibly.
The “blinding vision on the cross” speaks of a reality that cannot be domesticated, and still presents humanity with decisive choices.
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