Orissa to Calcutta

Elsa and I have been trucking along since I last blogged. We are now spending our last day together, as mid-afternoon, we split and go our separate ways. For the past few days we have been staying in a dilapidated colonial era hotel in Chennai called the broad lands lodge. It is a great place apart from all the mosquitoes, the absence of curtains and the 4 am wake up call from the mosque next door. Still, my thoughts return to Orissa. I am working against the unconscious inclination to set these experiences behind me, even as I may continue to fight for justice in words. It's not easy. Simone Weil says that to pay attention to human affliction is almost impossible, and any occurrence of it is like a miracle. I don't think that she is too far off. We listened to many stories of human suffering, of people running for their lives from those who would murder them if they did not convert. We saw people in the camps, still living in tents, unable to return to their village. While we heard their stories, I wonder how much we were really able to listen to them. In part, I think it comes from the defense mechanism, hearing but hardening your heart so that the moment the plea for money comes you are able to withstand it. While I hate what money does to potential relations, even more so, I hate what money does to me. I hate how i feel I have to steel myself to such a demand, even though I already know that I legitimately cannot solve their problems.
While these people are in need of relief and charity, before charity, they are in need of justice. As the pope said in his latest encyclical on development, Justice is not extraneous or alternative to charity, rather, justice is the minimum measure of charity and development. These people of Orissa need justice, deserve justice, deserve what is rightfully theirs! They deserve security and peace. They deserve to have compensation for the negligence shown by the government. They deserve to have legal justice: to have the looters and in particular the murderers and the` organizers of the catastrophes be brought to justice.
Still, that does not forestall the demand that they be paid attention to, that we truly listen to them and feel their pain and suffering. Instead their stories came like a distant dream in an impossible world, rather than the hard reality of life. The father who was killed a year ago in the conflict is now forever gone. The camp of 50 christian families are living without land to till, still dependent on what meager resources they are receiving from relief organizations. One wonders how people live on in hope. Still, I must not paint a picture entirely of misery. Those sisters who we met working with them have spoken of a certain joy instilled in these people from these experiences. I can hope it to be true, and have seen them smile at our arrival and in our interactions. Some women we met spoke of how seeing us there, they were able to forget their worries, and that is why they were smiling. Representatives at a baptist camp spoke of how this strike against them has helped them turn away from material worry, recognizing that everything comes from God. The stories of the persecuted, modern day confessors (the name given to early Christians who survived torture and still refused to recant their beliefs) are emboldening. Still, I found disconcerting a certain fatalism, which said that this violence only came about because of God's will, and will only end by God's will. While on a fundamental level there can be some merit to what they say, I worry that it keeps people from expressing their own agency. More so, I worry that they will be less inclined to be channels of God's justice and peace through the legal and governmental systems here in the country.

Our journey in Orissa ended with a long bus ride followed by a long train ride. We landed in Calcutta the next morning, staying at a guest house that was set in the middle of a long stream of Missionaries of Charity homes for the sick, the dying, the destitute, for women, for orphans, etc. Just walking on the main road, I counted 5 of these Mother Theresa houses. Even if the signs were not there, the streams of foreign volunteers heading either to mass or to breakfast at the mother house every morning and the higher concentration of people begging on the street would alone be a sign of the sisters presence. We attended mass one morning at the mother house and ate breakfast with the volunteers following. With so many people from all over Europe and America, I can imagine that Calcutta would be an attractive place to come volunteer: a middle ground between the isolation found in being a border crosser, and an experience still wholly other. Mother Teresa's burial place, accessible from the first floor of the mother house, was a simple raised coffin in the middle of a concrete room. While nothing exotic, there was still a sense of sanctity about the place that made it easy to enter into deep prayer. The sisters themselves serve as an interesting phenomenon in the question of Inter-faith relations. I have become very interested in the question of the spaces that we create to facilitate in the encounter with the other. For the sisters, this space is need. Wherever there is human need and human suffering, it is their charism to be there. In speaking with a sister in Orissa, I learned that there is more than just humanism here. Not only do the sisters find Christ in this religious other, because they are thirsty, because they are hungry, because they are poor, but it was "mother's" philosophy that you need to encourage a Muslim or a Hindu to be good Muslims or Hindus so that they will encounter God there.

One could begin to think that christian discipleship pushes one out lovingly towards the other, and that it is christian discipleship which encourages the religious other to deeply pursue their own faith. My own reflections informed by my readings and experiences have led me to believe that christian discipleship constantly pushes one beyond the walls of the church in love towards the other. This is not a blind love, but as Benedict writes, it is love in truth. In this truth, we recognize that all people are God's children, particularly the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the hungry, the naked, the dispossessed, and the prisoner. Not only are we pushed towards the other, but we find Christ in this other. Love demands, however, that we respect the other as other, as a Muslim, as a Hindu, as an Indian, even as we seek and see God in them. How does one then begin to make sense of that in the other which disturbs us, which is strange and foreign to us?