Teachings
Burning with Love
It was one of those moments that you could miss in the middle of a normal conversation, sharing a cup of tea and butter toast. I was sitting with a few Beloveds at the dining room at the St. Colombo School in Delhi. Brother Morris Finn was telling stories of his life in Ireland when he joined the Christian Brothers. Every few sentences he would catch our attention with stanzas from an Irish song.
We had all just come back from visiting the shantytown of Bawana on the outskirts of Delhi. The medical project that our community had helped start a year ago was thriving. The clinic was filled with medicines, and the nurses were happy. Only 400 patients a day instead of 1000. Health standards were improving.
I was lost in thought between Brother Finn's story of personal renunciation and the memory of a small child who lived next to the clinic. The child was sick: a haunting image. Hollow eyes, swollen sacks along his cheekbones. Something had invaded his tear ducts. I felt that feeling that mothers get. A stone of panic in the heart when we know a child is in danger. And He? He laughed playfully as if all was well in his life as his hand gently touched mine.
I was ready for action. We had a car at our disposable, rupees in our pockets. I turned to a Brother and asked why the child had not been taken to the general hospital, just 5 km from the clinic, to see a specialist. And could we take him now? The answer stunned me. His mother had given a NO to medical treatment. We were helpless to act. I was silenced in a place that I had never known. A mother had refused treatment for her child. That stone of panic sank, driving a hole into my being, birthing awareness in my soul.
I was drifting in and out of that feeling when Brother Christopher entered the room. Something passed between us. Our eyes told a story. I was mute. He began to speak about waking one day to find that the Delhi Municipality had leveled most of the huts next to the school, and the slum children he loved teaching during after school hours were relocated beyond the reach of daily visits. Train fare was prohibitive as it cost the price of a day's food. Now Bawana was their home. Then he laughed. Today of all days, a few of the children had managed to catch the train to Delhi without being caught empty pocketed. He had spent the day swimming with them in the school pool. He called it his ritual baptism. To swim with the Dalits, the lowest cast in India, was to break the tome of India's social injustice. A baptism by fire in water. The untouchable and the touchable sharing a swimming pool.
Brother Christopher had often referred to the first time he had taken the plunge. He had been a Brother for years, but he had never crossed a barrier to open himself to the poor in solidarity. He had kept himself from them, a stone blocking part of his heart. A stone of ideas, rules and conventions about how life should and ought to be lived based on how he was taught. Preventing complete surrender to his Unknown. Surrender to God taking the form of Untouchable.
I never found out how it happened that he climbed into a pool one day. I imagine that something came over him. The stone blocking his love became unbearable. The children became just children and he one who loved children, play carrying them into the moment of baptism, the moment that changed him. The moment that lit a fire. A roaring fire to serve the poor without separation. A fire that respected their traditions and the means by which they negotiated their life. A fire that burned for them and not his idea of them. A fire that gave unconditionally.
I had struck my moment of baptism in Bawana that day. Fire was burning through me. A mother had refused medical treatment for her child. The unthinkable. Yet the child is loved. His laughter and little hand tell me a story of love and care. A stone is moved in my heart in the face of this love. A stone built from values and patterns forged from my heritage. That day, my stone struck itself, giving a piece of itself to birth a fire of unconditional love in a place reserved only for my idea of social justice. Opening a path of solidarity with her as a mother outside my pattern of mothering, challenging my idea of meaning of life itself.
My spiritual Mother Hilda told me that I would have to give both my inner and outer garment of consciousness to God. It was not until that moment in Bawana that I experienced the meaning of her words. The meaning that was meant for me. My most precious possession that I had not surrendered to God was the gift of life itself. I believed that this gift was to be honored, preserved and cared for at all costs.
To this end I had given myself to a life as a healer in the form of mother. It was this that gave my life meaning. A meaning that was challenged in Bawana in the joyous eyes of a child and the refusal of a mother. I was to become naked in the face of her expression of love. Disturbed at my core by her choice. Opened, to be ignited with a fire to serve and love without attachment to life itself. As a mother. Burning. Burning. Burning. Undone by the Unknown and the Unknowable...
As I travel to each of you this spring, I come to witness the doors of your heart. Helping each of you to remove the stones that may be blocking your love. Challenging you to love more deeply. Disturbing you in the places within, where you have closed yourself to the unthinkable. Burning with you the pictures of separation. Entering your world of the Unknown. Opening, opening, opening to Love.
Flare Up like a flame. Love, serve and rejoice!
In love and thankfulness for your daily presence in my life,
Nura