To respond with love

Last Friday I spent the day packing boxes full of peoples' donations for parts of Eastern Europe where there is extreme poverty. I went to help because the woman who collects the donations in her house (who was working for this charity since before the fall of the Berlin wall) is now ninety and, as a severe asthmatic, has been told she should no longer lift anything, how ever small. This hasn't stopped her. The donations will be couriered through Poland until they reach a religious community there. When it gets to the Fathers it will be divided up in order to share it among communities in need and then it will be taken on to parts of the Ukraine, Belarus and among others, communities still affected by the Chernobyl disaster, where babies are still being born without eyes. It will be taken by the Fathers themselves who will go back and forth tirelessly with fairly limited transport until it is all delivered. It is only scratching the surface, yet because of the personal response of all these people children will have toys, elderly people will have soap, mothers and fathers, teenagers will have clothing. Without that van of aid they would not. It really is as simple as that.

It is difficult to describe how humbled I felt being around Vi, the woman in question. I packed for a few hours and was tired; she has people in and out of her house at all different hours of the day all the time. Each day friends from church come in and do some packing. Yet all of us are purely bathing in the light of her true goodness- since this is one of her many projects. She never loses patience with her packers and insists on making us tea and cakes, she answers thousands of questions from those of us who have no idea of the severe customs laws, she painstakingly copies out labels for every bag and box in Polish - she has looked up and checked all the words and has to copy them from her hand written list. This is a woman whose favourite Birthday present was 900 tea bags for her parcels. In parts of the Ukraine people can't afford tea, all they can drink is hot water. Vi has responded to them, but more than this, she has responded to them with love.

There are so many forms of poverty in the world, in our own lives. One of the great examples of love in our world today is Jean Vanier, founder of the L'Arche community. It is his belief that each of us is poor and handicapped in our own way so we shouldn't get any ideas about our own greatness, nor others lowliness. Each of us can give and each of us can learn from one another but no human being is less valuable than another in the sight of God. I understand all of this as best I can - with all my own flaws.

Nevertheless, I feel an increasing concern in my own life about how I am responding, personally, to the cries of the poor. I feel a stronger pull towards walking with them in my own life in some way. In Western terms I don't come from a particularly wealthy family but I have been given so much in my life in terms of love and the education I received- I believe that this privilege is a responsibility- the tools I need to respond. My university chaplain constantly warned us of this- if you are given opportunity then it is your responsibility to turn this into a chance to love. I know that I have written in the past about when I was in Tanzania two and a half years ago, about how the children I met there have burrowed into a place in my heart. I think about their lives often and I think about their pain. It is easy for me to see snippets of lives of those who suffer, to be briefly united to them and to feel compassion for them. It is much harder to know what to do about these feelings. How can we help those who most need it? How can we turn these feelings into a loving response in whatever way that might be possible?

I don't have any answers to that one (obviously) except the one that we all have, the one that Christ ultimately gives us - respond with love. How we do this is deeply individual and personal (again, sorry I am stating the obvious). As long as we respond. Action through prayer is certainly a highly powerful response and you can see it working in our own missionaries.

I just feel that I need to be working on improving my personal response. I am grateful as always to be part of a Church that does so much for the poor, no matter the criticisms levelled, I have seen it in action. Where there are no others, the Church is there at the heart of poverty. Thus we are all there.

Below is a video I filmed of the kids singing in the Fransalian school in Tanzania. It was the happiest school I have EVER visited and it is one of the many projects the MSFS are responsible for in just this one area. You get to hear me laughing away at the end as I was treated to another rendition of my 'favourite' song. It makes me smile whenever I watch it. Projects like this are hope personified in a world where there is no infrastructure whatsoever to support the average person. Education is a light of strength. Christ lives in the hope of each one of these children.

I ask for your prayers as I am deciding a few important things in the coming months. I believe I have been offered an opportunity to respond more fully on a personal level - I ask for your help that I will do His will. That I will respond with love in the particular way he wishes me to.

I promise to keep you informed as things develop.

Poem for Friday

Joseph

 

The silence

Watches over

Without the eyes of the

World to meet him.

 

You will not look to seek him,

Even though

He is just a little way behind.

 

He is the strength

Touched by gentility of mind.

 

He is keeper

And the leader,

 

Who sought Him

Sorrowing.

 

The calm on the flight,

The clarity of sight,

When all around

Was panic and slaughter.

 

Protector in the stillness;

The silhouette in the distant desert

Whose feet met the sand,

Silently,

In the unfamiliar land,

While the blood

Of innocence was behind.

 

And so he lead

And we will never know what was

Said

Or what passed between the

Beloved

Throughout their journey

 

We can only know the stillness,

The depth of willingness…

 

Of what it is to love.

 

We can only touch upon the

Humility

Of one who was so

True

And so

Willing to become the

Facility,

 

Who lived the hidden life,

Bathed in the

Greatest gift of light...

Which is given to us all.

 

Listen for the call…

 

For in the still,

Small, 

voice,

In the whisper of the dream...

It shall come.

Sleep in the knowledge

And comfort

Of silence.

Auschwitz - a brief encounter (Auschwitz I)

This has been a long time in coming -I've finally got the time I need to sit down and tell you a little about my trip to Auschwitz. In many ways Auschwitz is not a place that needs explanation or introduction. I think I have spent so long getting round to writing this post because I did not want to write something that was just emotive or generic - that simplified the meaning of that place. I think it is worth starting by saying what a complex place it is- on a physical and emotional level. On the one hand it encapsulates every horror and evil it is possible for human beings to commit; degradation, mass murder (including the gassing of small children), experimentation, forced labour, starvation, forced prostitution - and honestly that is naming just a few. On the other it is a place that celebrates human life and makes known, with more clarity then any place I have ever been, what a terrible sin it is to waste a single drop of human blood. It makes clear that loss will always be felt - that you can't erase human beings without trace -no matter how hard you try, even by incinerating the bodies of those you wish to destroy. In both camps one feels that the earth itself is resounding with a kind of silent shock and horror. This place is testament to the value of human life and what we can survive.



(Left, the courtyard where prisoners assembled for role call)















Of course atAuschwitz I (seen in top photo)- the smaller of the two camps- Maximilian Kolbe acts as a part of the testament to the value of life. I have loved his story and had always imagined it a certain way; the courtyard where he offered his life, the cell, the people- obviously, reality is somewhat different. In many ways the camp looked more pleasant than I imagined, as did his cell- in reality what happened there was much worse than anything most of us could comprehend. As it happens Block 11 (seen below) where Fr Kolbe was starved to death is a place of notoriety for a multitude of reasons. When the allies arrived there to liberate it they found a stack of bodies where vile experiments had been carried out on the upper floors and that was after Nazis had tried to destroy the evidence. In the basement of the same building is the cell, bigger than I thought it would be but no less dingy and miserable. Perhaps one of the most confusing things is that from the outside it looks like a respectable red brick building no different from one you might pass in any part of Europe. There is a peace close to that cell that doesn't lie anywhere else in Auschwitz I. It is simple and stark yet somehow triumphant in the midst of misery. Above ground, just to the left of where the cell lies is the place where prisoners, often women were shot. The Building to the far left with blacked out windows is where women were sterilized and experimented on by Josef Mengler (this area can be seen in the photograph below- if you look to the bottom right hand corner you can see the ventilation shafts which belong to the starvation cells - Kolbe's is second from the end)

I tell you this not to sensationalise or just for horrors sake but because in my opinion anyone who could find LOVE and God in this most awful of human deserts is more deserving of sainthood than any other I could think of. I now realise that Kolbe did not just sacrifice his life - he sacrificed it HERE. In this place where human nobility and hope was a distant, untouchable memory for most and to me that makes his triumph over evil all the greater. He was staring evil in the face, he was surrounded by it, by inhumanity, yet his love and humanity were so active here that they allowed him to lay down his life. No matter what people say this is true faith - only real faith could make that possible. There were many acts of love and bravery in those camps - whether Jew, Jehovah's Witness or political prisoner - these people are some of the most impressive to have existed. To find courage and hope anywhere can be difficult - to find it in this place- that is nothing short of a miracle.

(Left, the cell in which Fr Kolbe died-video below)

In Auschwitz I the birds sing now and the watchtowers look out over a small camp compared to Birkenau. Auschwitz I has become something of a museum and here you see the clothes and shoes that the prisoners in Birkenau were forced to part with. This was, in its own way, a deeply spiritual experience - connecting with the forsaken and forgotten of this world. Looking at summer shoes, red party shoes and children's shoes that remain as a testament to those who wore them - deeply personal and yet abandoned without reference . The hair, the cases, the hairbrushes - in many ways it was overwhelming to be confronted with so much. Yet I felt it important to take the time to recognise it. With the babies clothing I could not even bare to take a photograph - it seemed too invasive. It is certain that no children survived Auschwitz. Even so one does not leave this place feeling all humanity is full of worthless evil- instead one leaves feeling united to the individuality of every human life. You can pile up shoes in a room yet each will be different in size, colour and pattern and while it shows you the scale of mass murder it also tells you that each of those murdered had their own unique being, they can never be repeated and this makes their loss awful but it also speaks of their unknown value- a value that transcends this world.

In the next post I will write about te main camp - Auschwitz II or Auschwitz Birkenau where the main gas chambers were - in this place many more were murdered than in Auschwitz I. It is very different and very powerful

This is a pretty awaful video in terms of clarity( I had to make what I could of space and time but hopefully it will give you a sense of Fr Kolbe's cell.)

Inspirations on a Sunday - Part 2