None of us asked to be brought into this world, but once given birth, one has a single certainty: death.
On the Sunday of St.Thomas, it was as if even the All-mighty himself showed His mercy to all those people, who were heading with their grieved souls to the house of prayer. It was a cloudy day, though it wasn’t raining yet and it was warm.
The natural instinct of the villagers to go to church revealed their longing for humbleness and prayer for the arrival of spring. It may sometimes seem that happiness is more than we usually think, as it normally feels with sorrow. On this Sunday, they also had a priest in their village who was preaching on many churches in these small villages. In order for their joy to be fulfilled on this holy day, they had the annual church fair.
There was a little time before the religious service began, which was used by the villagers for gathering flowers and praying for their LOVED ONES, gone from their lives and “taking their repose” in the village’s graveyard near the church. The course of their prayers and tears shed at the bedside, of the ones who brought us into this world and guided our lives, would have been more bearable or more possessed if it wasn’t for the times in which we live, being more than unbearable, and worthy of the crying. Most of the time the unbearable weight of being afflicts the ones who are already tormented; the ones for whom life has never been delightful. The families with lots of children, the old men and others questioning their faith. As if the poverty wasn’t enough and hard to bear, some have discovered that here in this country there are other nationalities, and religions, and the reason for their faithfulness helps to dispel feeling of enmity grown involuntarily and enabling the believed to gather the fruits of joy and cast aside feelings of sorrow, mourning and despair.
We are only two years since the revolution and still we feel dominated by that strange sense of loneliness and a slim return of the fear, not long ago faded.
Wandering through the small graveyard near the church, reading the inscriptions from some of the crosses, somehow I felt my soul lighten. I realized that this lightness wasn’t gained through the prayer of some acquaintance or other, but from the readings of those crosses I noticed that the words: “good one, dear one, loved one”, were used very often.