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The impulse to transform terror, to resist its tide with language or music or love, flows from a perception that all history is caught up in meaning greater than a single event can reveal and that has been showing itself through the ages, an act of faith Langer cannot allow himself in the dark aftermath of the death camps. His views are not particularly Jewish, nor mine peculiarly Christian. We have made different choices of belief, each available within the other's orthodoxy: the one to see certain events as beyond the scope of divine intention and therefore solely of human doing (secularism), the other to see all history as informed by the freedom of human choice but ultimately subject to God (theodicy), lifting the death of martyrs from the sheer helplessness of victimhood to a purposed gain.

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints," writes the psalmist (116:15). "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord" (Rev. 14:13). Though tortured or persecuted or stricken, the lives of his children are never wasted in God's sight. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1983 Templeton Address, "Men Have Forgotten God," we hear from the man who exposed the 60 million dead under Stalin to an incredulous world in language devoid of empty solace or evasion. He said, "The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century."

The flaw of sensibility that lacks divine dimension is to see only oppressors and victims. Such a view refuses to acknowledge the moral force of the individual. To see clearly is to look intently, without flinching, at all that is human, the degradation and the rarer glory, and also to witness, in what is visible, all that we are given to see of God.

I overhear in the fragments a quiet mingling of purpose and sorrow that speaks sometimes in letters home from the field or in journal entries or phrases of static-congested radio transmission. It is here that the unseen imprint of God seems almost perceptible in the martyrs' astonishment at God's presence in their dire straits, in their repeated insistence on an unfathomable peace that suffuses the elements surrounding them or, in some cases, in the mere acquiescence to living, though near the end many begin to have premonitions of death.

Here we glimpse what the martyrs themselves identify as the grace of God, perhaps somewhat nebulously for those of us looking on, reaching to catch the hem of his robe--where is God? They depend for strength on a power that reveals itself at the final gasp of their own frailty. In these fragments there is none of the requisite hyperbole of early martyrologies, but the resolution of those whose hearts have turned toward heaven. I mark the simple words: peace, rest, quiet.

From the Boxer uprising, more of the letter from Lizzie Atwater to her sister, written August 3, 1900:

Dear ones, I long for a sight of your dear faces, but I fear we shall not meet on earth. . . . I am preparing for the end very quietly and calmly. The Lord is wonderfully near, and He will not fail me. I was very restless and excited while there seemed a chance of life, but God has taken away that feeling, and now I just pray for grace to meet the terrible end bravely. The pain will soon be over, and oh the sweetness of the welcome above!

My little baby will go with me. I think God will give it to me in Heaven, and my dear mother will be so glad to see us. I cannot imagine the Savior's welcome. Oh, that will compensate for all these days of suspense. Dear ones, live near to God and cling less closely to earth. There is no other way by which we can receive that peace from God which passeth understanding. . . . I must keep calm and still these hours. I do not regret coming to China, but am sorry I have done so little. My married life, two precious years, has been so very full of happiness. We will die together, my dear husband and I.

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August 12 1996, Vol. 40, No. 9