QUARRIED STONES : And other spiritual facts.

Urbs Jerusalem
Beata dicta pacis visio
Quae construitur in caelis
Vivis ex lapidibus...

The vespers hymn from the liturgy of the consecration of a Catholic church, one of the oldest surviving Latin liturgies, speaks of the blessed city Jerusalem being built of living stones. To describe the church as made of "living stones," when the business at hand is the consecration of a church newly built of quarried stones (at great cost and effort, no less), may seem to involve some ambivalence. But there is neither ambiguity nor ambivalence. What we sense in this hymn, and in the entire rite of church consecration, is metaphor. It is metaphor the way the church itself is metaphor, a far-reaching image that includes the concrete, the human, the supernatural, and the divine. The church is buildings, it is people both living and dead, it is the heavenly host, and it is God. It is all these united through that most extraordinary belief which lies at the very heart of Christianity--the belief that the Word has become flesh.

I am daily reminded of the importance of our human flesh to all I believe. For I am writing this in Eastern Europe, in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, where the signs of tyranny and occupation are still so visible. Yet the human reality that is the church has endured in part because the monuments of past Christian life have endured. Consecrated stones remembered when the fear and distress of daily life under Hitler and Stalin made remembering too painful. The stones stood watch when flesh and blood could not.

I write this in a glassed-in cafe in the old city. The rainy end of the cold gray clouds flying across the sky has caught me unawares and driven me to seek shelter. So I sit impatiently, tormenting the bottom of my tea cup and hoping that the distant blue will determine the remainder of the day. Yet even with cold rain streaking the window I see how lovely this old city remains, and how tied it still is to the surrounding countryside. What were once country paths have long since been cobbled. The wall of unadorned house fronts following the street's curves bespeaks village realities more than urban pride.

Whatever the old city was like in past generations, today it is a visitor's delight, a colorful quarter with contemporary charm, built on centuries of life. It is also built on seventy thousand Jewish deaths. Sixty years ago these streets were full of the tumult and clatter of life--a vibrant community, largely Jewish, whose principal public forum was the street itself. The Vilnius community was one of Europe's largest, a religious and cultural center for European Jews.

Today that community is gone. Soon after the Nazis occupied the city in 1941, they began arresting the Jewish population and, over the course of ninety days, took half the arrestees to a forest ten miles out of town, shot them, and dumped them into mass graves. The remaining thirty-five thousand were then shut up in a newly created walled ghetto until 1943, when they, too, were killed.

More than a people disappeared. An entire culture with a hundred synagogues, and printing houses, libraries, and schools also disappeared. The main synagogue, a sixteenth-century monument with a renowned library, one of the finest in the world, was destroyed. So famous was this institution, and so vital the community, that the leaders of the early-twentieth-century renaissance in Jewish linguistics chose Vilnius as the site for a new institute for the study and propagation of the Yiddish language. All this was destroyed. Everything distinctively Jewish was destroyed. And what the Nazis left in ruins, the Soviets later reduced to rubble and carted away, so that not even a trace would be left.

Today, beyond shops and pastel-colored houses on Zyda Street is a park about the size of a playing field. It is bounded on the far side by a Soviet apartment block. The perimeter is planted with linden trees. On one end, one sees, in fact, a small, dingy Soviet-era school far along in the process of falling apart, a basketball court, and a few wooden and plastic jungle gyms for small children. Despite the raw look of the four-story apartment block that replaces the actual wall that the Nazis built in 1940 to create the ghetto, the trees, bordered paths, and open space create a soft and gentle look. There is no indication that this field was once a religious and cultural center for millions of Europe's Jews. The people are gone, and so too the very stones of the Great Synagogue that once stood here.

A mere half-mile away, on the eastern side of the old city, abutting wooded hills that form so much of this still-rural country, stands the boarded-up shell of a once-elegant baroque monastic church. Mismatched sections of rusting iron fence seal it off from the street. Behind the church, occupying a city block, is the even more decayed monastery itself. Missing roof tiles expose its supporting beams, and in a few places the roof has collapsed. Where the monks' windows once opened onto the inner court, squares of brick-rimmed blackness peer blindly from the stucco walls.

The lightness of the high church's lines and the details of its rococo tower still evoke the sounds of Mozart, despite the grimness of decay. Today its only visitors are the ravens flying in and out of the monastery windows; its only life the weeds growing in the littered field behind the church where Augustinian monks once tended roses.

Here, too, there is no one, no human presence. Just a ruin. But, unlike the school yard where the Great Synagogue once stood, here there is a ruin--one both beckoning and accusing. Whether it points to Nazi brutality, Soviet oppression, or, given the advance of the decay, the anti-Catholic policies of Czar Alexander III, it still points accusingly at an oppressor. And it beckons to the restorers who, year by year, move closer to the edge of the old city.

The monks are gone. The czars and the Nazis and the Soviets are gone. The worshipers are gone, at least from this church. Yet the stones still stand and the stones remember. They stand in desolation but they endure, unexploited. They rise in ruin, but it is a ruin that still tells of life. For in their decay and isolation they still remind us that once, many years ago, they were consecrated, set aside for a sacred use they still painfully proclaim.

I look at the ruin, and I recall the words of confreres who tell me that our church has no need of stones. The God of the living, they tell me, has no need for memories of the dead.

It may be so. But there are the seventy thousand people who once filled these streets with their bustle. Their painfully few survivors are determined that they be remembered with nothing less permanent than granite to record their dates and their numbers and the events that destroyed them and their world.

Yet the living, some confreres insist, need not be mindful of quarried stones. Maybe. If in the lightness of their perceptions they see nothing of note to record, then perhaps nothing enduring is required. But if somehow (in some way I cannot and do not want to understand) the finger of God touched that time, and if in some way those lives have permanence, then they merit a record. Even we with our presumed security, our continuity simply presupposed, do not wish our graves to be marked by paper or straw. For there seems no judgment upon the dead that is more cruel or contemptuous than the belief that their passing merits no note.

David K. O'Rourke, O.P., is a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, Berkeley, California.