The last time I went to the mountain, I found someone else had been to my quiet place. My initial response was disgust at the rubbish and garbage that littered my place of solitude and contemplation. But as I drew closer I realized something different. The rubbish was not strewn about; rather it was collected into a couple of small areas. What to my eyes was rubbish, now appeared to be some child’s or children’s treasure.Children, it seems, had visited the mountain to play. Part of their play was collecting what they could find. So what do you collect when you have no toys, no play stations, no nothing? The treasure collection included bits of dirty rags, a rusty nail, broken glass, a condom wrapper, a few tin cans, broken pieces of brick, and bits of plastic. Mountain treasure - collected and stored as part of a day of play.Poverty. The toughest challenge for me here is seeing the daily, grinding, struggle to survive that so many face. To get to know a family is most often to come face to face with their daily struggle. After rent and childcare is paid, a mother and her two children existing on $30 Cdn per month. Another family - trying to pay the rent and keep food in their stomachs on $60 Cdn per month. The family we have ‘adopted’, essentially four adults and two children, live on about $110 Cdn per month (fortunately they have no rent costs.) But, they willingly share what little they have, having ‘adopted’ or a least assumed the care of, a relative’s baby. Now they are a family of four adults and three children living on $110 Cdn.How does one respond? That is my recurring challenge. There is an emotional toll when not responding, letting others suffer. There is a sense of guilt looking in the fridge and knowing that the meat we bought for a barbecue with friends cost more than what many families spend on food for a week, or two, or three. What is compassion? Education offers hope for the future, but nothing for today. Help today, most often brings to light yet another need tomorrow. Do I turn away - immerse myself in the expatriate community where we don’t have need? Do I return home? Going home to Canada would avoid the agonizing effort of figuring out how to or whether to respond to yet another need. When does helping actually hinder? Should I worry about creating dependency? Multitudes of other families that I don’t know find ways to survive … or not. If I had never come, I would never have known the need.On a previous day on the mountain I had again mused of origins. If I am just an accident, one more mutation, then as the noted physicist Steven Weinberg notes, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”1 Or as Solomon wrote a few thousand years earlier, “Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”2 So where does that leave me. One option is to believe a seeming myth, the story, as one skeptic wrote, that"a cosmic zombie can make you live forever, but only on the condition that you symbolically eat his flesh, and telepathically inform him you accept him as your master, all in order that he remove, from an invisible organ called a "soul" - found only in humans - an evil force that began residing there when a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree."3
Yet this ‘story’ and all it infers, referred to by Paul as a treasure held in jars of clay4, is what calls humanity to look beyond one’s self and one’s needs to serve the other. Yes, and sadly, many things done in the name of Christianity have marred and mocked this treasure, yet without it the world would be a much darker place. This story, this treasure, is what calls us to a higher place, - to service to others, “the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force [for good] instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”5 Which brings me back to my challenge. The face of poverty, up close, is not an "issue", a political problem, nor even a call to give; it is the face of another human being – a woman, a man, a girl, a child. I can turn, and walk away; or I can be used up in the struggle, trying ‘step by step’ to know and follow where my Lord, (that cosmic zombie) leads. A jar of clay, little more that rubbish when used up and broken, but bearing treasure to its world.In the vastness of the cosmos, my existence is pointless, just a jar of clay that will return to dust. As the treasure on the mountain was rubbish to my eyes, will the treasure I gather in this life be meaningless rubbish in the light of eternity. Or will I/you follow another way, be used up and broken, spilling one treasure, to paradoxically gain another treasure, one in heaven.6 ~ Benno ~1 http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magaxine/7955846.stm?ad=1
2 Ecclesiastes 1:2
3 http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2009/02/27/tech-footprints.html (Reader comment posted 2009/02/07)
4 2 Corinthians 4:7
5 Anonymous
6 Luke 12:33; 1 Timothy 6:18,19
Let me help with washing the car.
I can use a broom too, even in this improvised toga.
It was a long day, and now an even longer night shirt.
A new day. H'mm, what adventure might it hold.
They could have told me not to dump sand on the car.