A Big Journey - Part 2

I wanted to write a bit more about my experiences of India as I recall them after all these years. It was, as I said before, a transforming time for me - it changed my whole life in just about every way possible.

I spoke in my last entry of our arrival in Calcutta and the profound collision it was with my western, well-to-do life. We visited Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying, her home for abandoned children, her home for anyone who had no one and nothing. I could not have imagined life at this level. It was not ever anything I would have met in the normal course of my life in Canada. And yet here were human beings who perhaps for the first time in their lives were being loved and cared for.

But I wanted to share just one experience that has stayed with me because it seemed to me to hold  all the variety of what we experienced in the poorest of the poor. We had gone to Madras on the train...in itself a most un-North American journey: food of distinctly uncertain origin to be bought through the window from people walking up and down the platform; toilets that consisted of a hole in the floor (no seat, nothing), blankets for rent that may or may not have been clean by our standards.  But this is a diversion.

When we got to Madras we met with some of Mother Teresa's sisters and they had asked us if we would care to go with them on their small van to a group of lepers for whom they changed bandages and did what they could. We of course said yes, though with trepidation.

We drove to what appeared to me to be a railroad siding. There were no trees only dust and flat and heat. The people who lived in this little community- or someone- had erected small metal roofed shacks - ovens, I would think, in the heat. I presume that running water and electricity were not any part of this. It was clear that the arrival of the sisters and their van was an important event for them - possibly the only medical attention they were getting.

As we arrived and the people saw that there were 3 visitors they were so very welcoming. Out came something for us to sit on - old kitchen chairs, now backless, which they put in the only shady place there was - under the overhang of the roof of the building at which the van had stopped. I was so moved by this. Why should they pay any attention to us? why should they share with us from their very meager household furniture? Why should they welcome us at all for their lives were clearly, miserable in the extreme. 

It was this small attention to the strangers in their midst that touched me profoundly. Here were people, rejected totally by their society, in dreadful physical condition - missing noses, missing ears, missing limbs which had just been eaten away not surgically removed and more and more and more. 

For the first time in my life, I began to ask myself how we can allow people to live like this? But it was also the first time in my life that I realised that, for the most part, however dreadful life is, there is an amazing sense in each person of their dignity as human beings; as people who are worthy - whether anyone else thought so or not. I saw it later when I went to l'Arche with people who had been terribly rejected but in whom there was a dignity that touched me to the very core of my being.

This statue is called "Jesus the homeless" and is by Timothy Schmaltz

It is this sense of dignity and this basic humanity that left the deepest impression on me. Sometimes, of course, that is not clearly visible until some time is taken and maybe eyes to see. I was helped to see this by my friend Sue who could see what I think Mother Teresa saw, that Jesus was there in 'his most distressing disguise'.

As I say, this began a huge transformation in my life. Somehow, the gift to 'see' with a different kind of heart and with compassion can make the people I encounter every day beautiful and then I can want to work with them and others to build a world where no one has to suffer like those men and women and children do.