Night

"I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour and offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately."
Elie Wiesel, from his Nobel Lecture

Not long after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, I had the privilege of seeing Elie Wiesel in person, as he gave a college commencement speech near to where I lived. I remember the afternoon vividly, a Sunday, pouring rain, the ceremony moved inside. The new location, a gymnasium, was humid, stuffy and over-flowing. But I somehow found a spot to stand, near the door through which the college dignitaries entered, including their honored guest, Wiesel. As he processed within a few feet of me to the makeshift stage, I was the one who felt honored - to be in the presence of a man who had truly emerged from the dark kingdom of night and had become the voice of 6 million people and more, some who had emerged with him, many who had not.

Wiesel, is a survivor, of the Holocaust, now 82, who has made it his life's mission to give voice to the darkness in our lives – to its horrors and its pain, its sorrows and its devastations. But also to give voice to life beyond the darkness. To give voice to the truth – the truth that, even when we are plunged into the darkness, we have within us the ability to emerge to gratitude, to grace, to generosity of spirit. To share with the world, a world that too often is enveloped in the darkness of night, that there is meaning even in the shadows, whatever they may be.