The Face Of God

The Face Of God
Orlando Lujan Martinez, IWAA

In The Young Lions captain Christian Diesel ( Marlon Brando) is a decent man who is loyal to Hitler, to the economic goals of the Nazis, and approves the war because he says, "It will be good for Germany." But it is near the end of the war and the captain has seen while walking through the devastated ruins of Berlin a boy, on crutches, missing a leg and is starting to think about the futility of war in which he has killed and seen many men killed. And has talked to a commandant of a death camp, while retreating through Poland. who has been ordered to kill the 10,000 jewish inmates before the Americans arrive.
Captain Diesel and a woman companion are at dinner with an old friend, also an officer, and his wife, the discussion turns to the defeated Germany and the tragedy of the war.
Diesels' friend says, at the end of his dialogue, about the futility of the war, "Germany is losing the war and after all the blown off arms and legs everything will remain the same," Then leaves.
Captain Diesel sits with his elbows on the table, his fingers rubbing above his eye brows, his friends words have disturbed him, he is remembering the boy in Berlin, and he says, quietly, to his woman companion,. "We are in a hole and you have to keep something in front of you or you will go insane."
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz wrote in A Life With Karol that In all the images of Karol he has seen, the one struck him most vividly in his heart is the one of Karol's' first visit to Poland, in 1979.
"It was morning, the Vistula was in the background and the sun was barely up. Warsaw was bathed in a extraordinary light. As soon as the Pope started speaking the whole crowd of young listeners was seized with excitement. And at the end of the speech his thousands of young listener, as if on cue, simultaneously raised their little wooden crosses, towards Pope John Paul 11.
But that sea of crosses: held in front and towards the Pope, contained the seeds of something much greater than even the popular Poland's Solitary Revolution which was happening at that time."
Cardinal Stanislaw continued, "The students adoration of Karol held a "mystery" which I wasn't completely aware of at that time." Dziwisz did not see that mystery again until many years later in the endless throngs of people who came to say their last farewell to Pope John Paul II . The intensity of feeling in the crowd revealed the profound legacy of Karol Wojtyla.
I, over the years, had watched The Pope on television and seen the humanity, the loving kindness on his face, and in the holy bearing of Pope John Paul II and did not see the "mystery" and therefore I could not find the words to tell myself what I was witnessing "in front of me" and therefore could not tell others, until Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz describe what I had seen in front of me when he wrote in A Life With Karol.
"He showed the face of God. Gods human face. He displayed the features of God incarnate."