The Cellist of Sarajevo

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
April 5, 2015

Vedran Smailovic played his cello as mortars were falling on his street. His courage shone a light on the insanity of war. The service features a choir piece inspired by his story composed by Kiya Heartwood and featuring cellist Anna Park & guitarist Klondike Steadman.

This is Easter, which is about life and death.

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.
Deuteronomy 30:19 New International Version (NIV)

Every day the choice between life and death is set before us. Some situations write it large, our choice, in flaming letters. Today’s story is about Vedran Smailovic, the Principle cellist in the Sarajevo Opera. Sarajevo was the capital city of a section of Yugoslavia called Bosnia-Hertigovina. It was a modern city of about half a million people. Yugoslavia was breaking up, with complicated factions you don’t need to hear all the details of for this story. Troops laid siege to the city in what was to be the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. It lasted nearly four years. Life, for the people there, became a daily search for food and water. Nearly 14 thousand people died in the siege, 5 thousand of those civilians.

There was a bakery which was still open down the street from Vedran Smailovic’s apartment. People lined up every day to buy bread, despite mortar shelling and sniper fire that claimed innocent lives every day. On May 27th, 1992, a mortar shell hit right where the people were standing in line for bread. It was total carnage, with 22 people dead and many wounded. Helping the wounded, Smailovic wanted to do something. He wasn’t a politician or a soldier. He had his cello. The next day he dressed in his tux and tails and, sitting on a chair scorched by flames, he sat in the hole left by the mortar shell’s explosion and played his cello. The piece he chose to play was Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, written from a fragment of manuscript found in the ruins of Dresden, Germany, after the firebombing of that city during WW II. He was taking the chance of being fired on by snipers or killed by more shelling, but this was his way of answering the war. People gathered to listen.

“Then he went to other sites where shells had taken the lives of Sarajevo’s citizens. He played there, and he played in graveyards. He played at funerals at no charge, even though the Serbian gunners would target such gatherings. His music was a gift to all hiding in their basements with rubble above their heads, a voice for peace for those daily dodging the bullets of the snipers. As the reports of Smajlovic’s performances on the shattered streets spread, he became a symbol for peace. A reporter questioned whether he was crazy to play his cello outside in the midst of a war zone. He countered, “You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello, why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?” Daniel Buttry

We are not being shelled here, but we still face the choice between life and death every day.

I want to tell you about my friend Marsha, who is dying. She has so many things wrong with her she doesn’t even bother listing them. Hospice came a couple of years ago, but six months later they left. She drives a big Oldsmobile 25 mph so if she has a heart attack on the way to the grocery store she won’t hurt anyone. Marsha is a poet. We met when I used this poem of hers in a church newsletter. It’s called

Fearing Paris

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped,
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.
All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.
Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.
Just to be on the safe side,
you decided to stay completely
out of France.
But then danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.
You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris first.”

Marsha Truman Cooper

About a month after the newsletter was put on the internet, I got a package from California. It was a book of this woman’s poems with a letter. She was “ego-surfing the Net;” she was happy that I had used her poem, and here were some more

I sent her a thank you note, along with one of my books. I didn’t hear from her for a long time, and I had a little worry that sending my book may have seemed like a smart-aleck thing to do. Maybe I should have just appreciated her work and not said “here, I’m a writer too!” I decided I would call her.

I got the answering machine. I was in the middle of saying “Marsha, hi, this is Meg Barnhouse calling,” when I heard the receiver lifted and someone going “wheeeeeeeeeee.” We started talking, and I told her how much I was enjoying her poems.

“I can send you everything, for free,” she said. It’s just that -“

“What?”

“Some of them are – spicy.”

“Yahoo,” I said.

“Whew, well, that’s out of the way, then,” she said. She had just experienced a conversion a few years ago that had really heated up her marriage, she said. “Conversion to what?”

“Oh, I hesitate to say, because you might think it’s so weird, but I’m not like that, I mean, it’s Roman Catholicism, but … you know…. Some religious people are just awful.”

I said that didn’t sound weird to me. I knew Catholics who were very nice, not awful at all.”

How did that heat up her marriage? “Well, since I got this new dimension to my life my husband seems to like me even better.” Her laugh started low and ended high, like a waterfall running backwards.

She said she and her husband had been married 37 years, and last night she had a dream about him, that they were making out in a parking lot, scandalizing the passers-by. She was thoughtful and bawdy and she was having fun. She mentioned in passing that she was sick. “I’m sorry you’re sick,” I said. “I hope you feel better soon.” She said, “Well, I may as well lay it all out for you. My heart is shutting down. My kidneys stopped working a few years ago, and then my heart, and I just got the news that my liver is going. So, I’m dying.”

She said she is praying all the time now, not to be healed, not to die, usually, except when the pain gets too bad. When she is appreciating, she says, the pain almost goes away. “I’m not feeling pain at all right now while we’re talking, so I must be appreciating a lot.” She said she just prays to feel love for Jesus and to feel his love for her. “It’s pleasure,” she said. “Love is pleasure, and if people say they love someone who never gives them pleasure of any kind, it’s a lie.”

I said, “That’s like some people saying they love a God they’re really scared of. I tell people don’t believing God who doesn’t believe in you,”

She said “YES, or even LIKE you.”

She said for her, that is what her religion is about, loving Jesus and being loved by him. I said that was it for me too, only I would call it The Spirit. “Same thing.”

“Yeah.”

“I asked to be shown heaven every day,” she said, “and I’ve seen it a lot. It’s different every day. Yesterday heaven was a white Rolls Royce, and I was sitting inside. You know, I’ve never been inside a Rolls, but I could smell the leather.”

Our Unitarian forefather, Henry David Thoreau wrote,

“When it is time to die, let us not discover that we never lived.”

My friend the poet is very sick, but alive.

You don’t even have to be actively dying to see this choice between death and life presented to you on a daily basis. Where are you going to put your focus? One the things that are wrong or the things that are going well? How are you going to let your words out into the world? To hurt or to help? Are you going to have a life of grumbling and fear or an open life where you make room for joy and creativity? Are you going to be stagnant or move forward?

We become soulful people here, religious people, to learn to be kind when it’s not convenient, to learn to forgive, to accept help. We are practicing to live more peaceful and joyous lives, but we are also practicing to live well and, eventually, to die well.

Mary Oliver captures that sentiment in her poem,
When Death Comes.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

So, you lions of courage, precious to the earth, don’t be just visiting here. Live deep and love generously. Everything is a brotherhood and a sisterhood. Life is unstoppable, and it will go on. And we are all part of it, now and forever.

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