This soul-harrowing concurrence of horrors and beauty helps account for T.S. Eliot’s calling April the cruelest month in his “The Waste Land.” Lilacs stir hope while Eliot remains haunted by memories of war and personal loss. He is homesick for winter’s snow-laden forgetfulness.

Eliot’s lilacs remind me of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” honoring the funeral train transporting Abraham Lincoln’s remains from Washington, DC to Springfield Illinois in April 1865.Whitman repeatedly praises the fragrance of lilacs, the hermit thrush’s “voice of uttermost woe,” and Venus, “the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe.” The wounds of the Civil War are fresh. Whitman remembers the broken bodies he nursed and the scattered bones of the dead. The remains of the man who conducted the war for unity slowly roll across the heartland and draw the nation’s grief to a focal point.

In the late seventies I lived in the woods of Nova Scotia and the hermit thrush’s summer song fluted across the lakes through humid air. Then came decades near alpine Colorado creeks where the hermit thrush warbled above the steady hiss of rushing water. For me, the song captures the great paradox of spring: full of bliss and sorrow, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “juice and joy,” and Whitman’s “Song of the bleeding throat, / Death’s outlet song of life”.

In “Auschwitz: A Failure of Contemplation,” Tessa Bielecki commemorates this eightieth year after the Auschwitz liberation with her reflections on her family’s pilgrimage to Poland in 1978, before the fall of the Soviet Union. The horror of the place was like being deprived of oxygen. She could hardly breathe.

She also discovered that despite the hell through which prisoners lived and in which millions died, some left shocking messages of hope. Holocaust survivor and writer Viktor Frankl witnessed defiant hope among some prisoners. He also understood it includes no guarantees, at least for the individual. A prisoner in Cologne’s Gestapo headquarters wrote this credo: “I believe in God even when God is silent.” A Ravensbruck prisoner witnessed “greatness of heart” among fellow prisoners, wrote a prayer, and offered forgiveness to tormentors.

If you are looking for wisdom in this season of political chaos, I offer “Creative Extremists: King, Michnik, and the Impossible.” In the face of dire threats from their governments, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and writer-activist Adam Michnik, member of Poland’s Solidarity movement in the1980s, embody nine virtues we can integrate into our daily lives (and they caution against one temptation to avoid).

The Way that became known later as Christianity was born in impossible circumstances. It arose in resistance to an empire whose power felt like a seven-headed dragon poised to kill newborn children (Revelation 12:4).The Hope unleashed by the little band of fools for Christ shows up occasionally in impossible situations, waste lands of injustice. Hope rises from lost causes, jail cells, disappearances, assassinations, and war crimes. It sings in darkness. It starlights. It lilacs. It loves the enemy. That’s my idea of Glory.