Walking the Wall

I was listening to a talk by a man named Shane Claiborne who worked with Mother Theresa as a young man in Calcutta and who has written a book entitled The Irresistible Revolution (which I haven’t read). He went to Baghdad with a group pushing for peaceful resolutions and was there helping in a hospital holding children while it was being bombed–he said at one point a Doctor ran into the room distraught and crying and said, “This violence is for people who have lost their imagination!” Certainly and interesting and challenging way to look at it–we need to regain our imaginations and come up with a better way!

Anyway, he describes an experience when he was in Calcutta rolling cotton balls in a leper community and the Dr. had to go out and told Claiborne to take over cleaning and wrapping a wound on the arm of a very old man. When he was finished, the man looked at him deeply in the eyes and quietly said–”Namaste.” And Claiborne whispered, “Jesus” back as he realized that what he saw in that man’s eyes was Jesus for him. Different people, different cultures, different religions–but they came together and understood what they each saw in the other was the same thing. He touches again and again on the beautiful mystery that is namaste–the word never ceases to evoke a quietness in me. There is a sense that if we truly understood, if we truly greeted each person with the understanding of greeting the divine, of the understanding that there is no “we” but only “I”–the world would be a better place and we would come up with better solutions than bombs.

Namaste