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Chapter Six

Be There

I have always been an advocate of crossing lines that keep people from helping one another. Those lines may be intangible barriers such as social status, or physical ones, such as an ocean. I am convinced that one of the reasons certain groups of people aren’t cared for is that we simply never think of them. That’s why, on many of our airlifts, we try to find groups of people to visit that would not be obvious. Then, when our volunteers return to their home towns, they are much more aware of those who are out on the margins of our attention. Once people see how easy it is to cross cultural and economic lines on these airlifts, many readily do the same as part of their lifestyles when they get home.

There were obvious lines to cross in the facilities run by Mother Teresa in Calcutta. The people there were suffering, and they were placed in specific facilities everyone could easily find.

But there is also a village outside of Calcutta inhabited by people with leprosy, that horrifying disease that destroys flesh. When we found out about this leper colony, and that people there were abandoned and feared, we took all of our volunteers to the village, hired a group of musicians and entertainers, and threw the residents a party.

We did the same thing in Vietnam, where leprosy is still a serious health issue. We brought the Vietnamese village the best grain we could find for their cooking and provided school supplies for each child. The religious people in our group prayed blessings over those who requested prayers.

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I got this idea after hearing the great preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo talk about being in a greasy spoon in Honolulu at three in the morning, unable to sleep because of the time change in traveling from the East Coast. While he was sitting at the counter eating a donut and drinking bad coffee, three boisterous prostitutes came in.

“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” one announced. “I’m going to be thirty-nine.”

One of the women scoffed at her and mockingly asked if she wanted someone to throw her a party.

“Why do you have to be so mean? I was just telling you, that’s all. I don’t want anything from you. Why should you give me a birthday party? I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?”

That conversation gave Campolo an idea. When the women left, he asked the man behind the counter “Do they come in here every night?”

“Yeah,” the man said.

“The one who sat next to me, does she come here every night?”

“Yeah, that’s Agnes. She’s here every night. Why do you want to know?”

“Because I heard her say that tomorrow was her birthday,” I said. “What do you think about us throwing a birthday party for her, right here, tomorrow night?”

The employee liked the idea and called to his wife in the kitchen.

“Get out here. This guy’s got a great idea. Tomorrow is Agnes’s birthday. This guy wants us to go in with him and throw a birthday party for her, right here, tomorrow night!”

His wife loved the idea.

“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Agnes is one of those people who is really nice and kind, and nobody ever does anything nice and kind for her.”

“I’ll come back here tomorrow morning about two-thirty and decorate the place,” Campolo said. “I’ll even buy the birthday cake.”

“No way,” said the man behind the counter. “The birthday cake’s my thing. I’ll make the cake.”

At two-thirty the next morning, Campolo was back at the diner. He had picked up some paper decorations at a store and made a big sign that said “Happy Birthday, Agnes!” He decorated the diner from one end to the other.

The diner’s owners must have gotten the word out on the streets of Honolulu, because by 3:15 nearly every prostitute in Honolulu was in that diner. Wall to wall prostitutes, and Campolo!

At 3:30 the door swung open and in came Agnes and her friend, and everyone in the diner screamed “Happy Birthday!”

Campolo said he had never seen anyone so flabbergasted, so stunned and shaken. Her mouth fell open and her legs seemed to buckle, he said. Her friend grabbed her arm to steady her. As she was led to one of the stools at the counter they all sang “Happy Birthday” to her. When they got to the part where they sang “Happy Birthday dear Agnes,” Campolo said it looked as if she were going to cry. But when they brought out the cake with the candles on it, she broke down and wept.

Everyone badgered her into blowing out the candles, after which she kept staring at the cake. Finally someone handed her a knife to cut it. She continued to stare while it got quiet in the diner.

She asked if it was all right to not eat it right away.

The owner shrugged his shoulders.

“Sure it’s OK!” he said. “If you want to keep the cake, keep the cake. Take it home if you want to.”

“I just live a couple of doors down,” Agnes said. “I want to take the cake home and show it to my mother, OK? I’ll be right back. Honest!”

She got off the stool, Campolo said, picked up the cake, and carrying it like it was the Holy Grail, walked slowly toward the door. When the door closed, he said there was a stunned silence in the place.²

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When I heard Campolo tell that story, I committed my own heart to seek out diners where I could and provide cakes to people who generally don’t get birthday parties.

That’s why we go to the leprosy clinics. No one else will touch these people. And they are dying from being unable to feel touch any longer! That sounds like a lot of people without leprosy, doesn’t it? Everyone encounters someone every day, often across cultural lines, who could benefit from a gesture that says “I see you. You matter.”

It is not always possible, or even necessary, to cross major cultural or physical barriers to serve others. Sometimes the people are right next to us and need something very small. Sometimes all they need is for us to be present with them—simply be there.

Anne Lamott, in her book Traveling Mercies, said “When all is said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate. But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding. So you come to keep them company when it feels like the whole world is falling apart, and your being there says that just for this moment, this one tiny piece of the world is OK, or is at least better.”³

That’s how it seemed when we visited the leprosy clinics. The people there hide, or are hidden, from the world. But it’s easy to see them if we’re looking. We don’t have to cure their leprosy. Our presence, our “there-ness,” will alleviate a different affliction. By keeping them company for a little while we show they aren’t invisible. Being ignored, or unseen, is a terrible disease. Feeling unworthy is another one.

In his book Father Joe, Tony Hendra tells of being a conflicted young man who was behaving badly as he battled internal demons. Off and on he visited a monk in a monastery, first as a punishment and then by choice. One desperate night Hendra was contemplating suicide because he thought he had committed an unforgivable sin. In the middle of the night he pounded on the monastery door in search of the monk, Father Joe. The monk at the gate reluctantly went to find Father Joe, who had obviously been sleeping.

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“He did nothing but listen,” Hendra wrote. “He made no attempt to calm me or cool the heat of this new development in the insane life of this insane child. He didn’t try to explain why I was feeling these things, why what seemed so catastrophic was actually normal, common for my age. . . . He didn’t try to shock me out of my funk or manhandle me for my own good with tough love. He called down no higher powers to intercede on my behalf, nor did he invite me to join him in prayer.”

Father Joe did not try to give Hendra answers, or even tell Hendra that everything was going to be all right.

“He took my condition head on, as seriously as I took it,” Hendra said. “Tonight there was just a desperate boy on a cold and lonely cinder spinning through a meaningless universe who’d come running across the Home Counties in a waking nightmare.”

Father Joe found a place at the monastery for Hendra to stay, and sat at the edge of the bed until Hendra fell asleep.

“How long he sat there I have no idea. Two minutes? Two hours?” Hendra said. “Peace descended like snowflakes. My terror receded until it was far out to sea. The dark hordes were nowhere to be seen. Sweet oblivion came and I slept.”⁴

Father Joe didn’t provide answers. That isn’t what Hendra needed. Father Joe provided presence. He knew that the best response in this situation was to be there.

After Father Joe died, Hendra read his obituary and was surprised by the statement that Father Joe had “touched the lives of so many people, in England and abroad, in his own Church and not . . . it is hard to give full weight to the extent of his pastoral influence.”

In his self-centered arrogance, Hendra had assumed that he was the only person Father Joe had influenced so deeply.

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“Father Joe had undertaken not just a few, or even a few dozen, but hundreds of such life-altering voyages,” Hendra wrote. “It was immensely disarming and engaging to be treated as if you were the only one in his life; but then, for the time you were with him, you were. He loved the one he was with: spiritually promiscuous, utterly discreet.”

After Hendra expressed surprise that Father Joe had these kinds of “listening” relationships with many others, one of the monks at the monastery said “Ah yes—everyone thought they were Joe’s best friend.”

“And all of us were right,” Hendra said. “We all were.”⁵

Father Joe’s example was the kind of experience I had when I returned to Kosovo as a civilian, a year or so after I had served there as an Army Reserve doctor. I was driving with some friends at night and one of them asked if I would mind going with them to look in on a woman who had been very ill. My friends had been helping her and her family off and on, and they wanted to check on her health while I was there.

A series of very bumpy roads led to this family’s three-room cinderblock house at the edge of a community. There were children everywhere. The clothes on some of them were filthy and ragged. The father came out and shook our hands. I could tell immediately that something was not right with him. The story, my friends told me, is that he was in a room gassed by Serbian military and he had suffered brain damage. The fellow was cheerful enough but seemed childlike.

Inside the house I heard moaning and yelling. I followed the noise and was startled by what I saw. Two young adults lay on the floor under blankets. One, who was deformed and appeared unable to sit up, stared at his visitors with the gaze of a frightened horse, frozen in place, his blanket soiled. The other, apparently agitated by the newcomers, moaned and shouted at the ceiling while repeatedly slamming himself into the wall.

The person in the most discomfort physically was the mother of these two incapacitated people. She was the wife of the brain-damaged man, and the mother of some of the children who were crawling in and out of my friends’ van outside.

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She sat in a chair much too large for her shrinking frame and I could tell right away that she was dying. Through an Albanian interpreter I asked her if she was in pain. Yes, she said. Her sister, standing nearby, told me that she had breast cancer. I took her vital signs and listened to her lungs. They were filled with fluid and she was getting very little air. Her pulse and blood pressure were very weak. She had more than breast cancer.

I talked with her about her children. The two in the other room were born with significant physical and mental defects, she told me. The children playing outside were fine physically, but they had so much energy that they were driving her crazy.

After giving her some pain medication I asked her if she knew how sick she was. She did. She was well aware of her condition, and very afraid.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

“Afraid of what will happen to my children when I am gone,” she said. Her sister assured her that they would be cared for.

Once her pain eased a bit, I asked if there was anything I could do for her. Because we were communicating through an interpreter, I wasn’t exactly sure I understood her answer. She pointed toward the open door and said “I want to go out there.” Or perhaps she was pointing to the sky and saying “I want to go away.”

Just in case, my friend and I carried her, in her chair, out into the night. She gazed up at the sky, black and scattered with stars. I knew that, as a doctor, I could not do another thing for her. But as a human being, a fellow resident from another side of the planet, I could remain by her side a while longer. We talked a little more about her journey ahead of her.

“I want to go to heaven,” she said.

“I’ll see you there,” I told her. The kids playing outside settled down a little, and the dogs stopped barking. The only sound was of the one son still hitting the wall indoors, and an occasional bellow from the family cow tied up nearby. The woman and I sat side by side, gazing at the stars. Her pain subsided a little, and I told her goodbye. She died a few hours later.

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Sometimes the greatest thing we can share with another human being is our “space.” True hospitality, Henri Nouwen writes, isn’t just about having someone come into our homes.

“It is possible,” Nouwen writes, “for men and women . . . to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.”⁶

Hospitality is not just opening up physical space. It opens up personal space as well. In addition to “making room” or “cleaning up” around a home or an apartment for someone, true hospitality makes room in our lives as well.

Lauren Winner, in her book Mudhouse Sabbath, speaks of her resistance to having people over to her apartment unless it was spotless and orderly. Given her housekeeping skills and how cramped her apartment was, that meant people were never invited in. Then she realized that she was not thinking about hospitality as “sharing space,” but as “showing off.” She wanted everyone to see how perfect her place was.

“If I’m inviting someone over for tea,” she wrote, “it might be nice if I emptied the kitchen trash can and didn’t leave dirty clothes all over the bathroom floor. But to be a hostess, I’m going to have to surrender my notions of Good Housekeeping domestic perfection. I will have to set down my pride and invite people over even if I have not dusted. This is tough.”

She then broadened that concept to include her life, not just her apartment. Before she “invited someone in” her life, she wanted to make sure her life was orderly and perfect. Which, of course, was never.

“Just as I’d rather welcome guests into a cozy apartment worthy of Southern Living, I’d rather show them a Lauren who is perfect and put-together and serene,” she said.

Having guests and visitors come into an apartment or a life, “if we do it right, is not an imposition, because we are not meant to rearrange our lives for our guests—we are meant to invite our guests to enter into our lives as they are,” she said.

Like most of our homes or apartments, our interior lives are not going to ever be “ready,” or perfect, for someone else to come in and share. But that’s where we live.

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“I ought to be able to risk issuing the occasional invitation,” she writes.⁷

I’m not talking about throwing parties, necessarily. I’m just talking about the value of being with someone who is tired of being alone. This is part of serving others. As Lauren Winner writes, it takes a different kind of thinking, but once that internal shift is made, it becomes easier than we thought. Creating space for others does not mean we have to have everything perfect first. We just have to be open to seeing others, and what we have to offer them, in a different light.

Hospitality is a way of looking at our fellow human beings, and it can be expressed in countless ways. The best way to express it, in my opinion, is simply to be with the person in need. They might not need anything other than the space you can create in your life for them.

The people in the leprosy village outside of Calcutta didn’t really “need” a concert. But they did need someone to say “I notice you.” The children in the leprosy village in Vietnam probably didn’t “need” the school supplies we gave them. They needed to be acknowledged. The woman in Kosovo was made a little more comfortable by the medicine I gave her, but what she needed was some assurance that her children would be cared for, along with someone to sit with her on her last evening on earth and talk with her about heaven. That’s creating space.

“Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy,” Nouwen wrote.⁸

In the movie Hotel Rwanda the main character, Paul Rusesabagina, played by Don Cheadle, is a hotel manager at a time when a rebellion boils over and members of the rebel Hutu tribe begin to slaughter those in the Tutsi tribe. It is gruesome and intense and infuriating to see the lives go to waste through political corruption and cowardice, but the redeeming moments of the movie are when the manager, whose hotel is already full to the brim with refugees seeking safety, continues to make more room for those who have no place else to go.

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More than a million Rwandan people were massacred in three months. Rusesabagina was able to save his own family and about a thousand others. He was not a politician, a soldier or a U.N. peacekeeper. In fact, he was a member of the Hutu tribe, and the people seeking refuge in his hotel were Tutsis, or “cockroaches,” as they were called by the militia. He was merely a man who could create space. He was the incarnation of hospitality. What he did was be there for the people who were afraid.

The way the movie ends illustrates his philosophy. He and his wife have just found their nieces in a refugee camp and head for the bus that will take them to safety. They have been told that there is room only for his immediate family.

“Do you think there will be room for all of us?” an aid worker asks.

“There’s always room,” he says.⁹

He knew what he was talking about. He had been making room all along. The tagline under the movie’s title was, “When the world closed its eyes, he opened his arms.” That would be something all of us could be known for, don’t you think?

Mother Teresa was a foreign-born nun in her late thirties, heading up a girls’ boarding school in Calcutta. But on her way through the city, she could not help being overwhelmed by the sight of people abandoned in the streets to die.

“Under the impact of those grim sights she felt a call to a new form of vocation,” wrote the psychologist James Fowler. “A ministry of presence, service, and care to the abandoned, the forgotten, the hopeless.”

In a world that gives attention and resources to those who can “contribute” to society, Fowler asks “What could be less relevant than carrying these dying persons into places of care, washing them, caring for their needs, feeding them when they are able to take nourishment, and affirming by word and deed that they are loved and valued people of God?

“But in a world that says people only have worth if they pull their own weight and contribute something of value, what could be more relevant?”¹⁰

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Mother Teresa didn’t create a movement, or a corporation, or a political action group. She saw someone and created space.

One of the most dramatic examples of someone “being there” came about during Christmas 1995 in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Just two weeks before, the local textile manufacturing plant, Malden Mills, burned to the ground. The plant’s 3,000 employees faced the prospect of having no jobs during the holidays. In addition, everyone assumed that the owner would take this opportunity to move the entire operation out of town, probably to a developing country with inexpensive labor. The city feared losing its greatest economic asset.

But, a day after the fire, the owner, Aaron Feuerstein, grandson of the company’s founder, announced that all employees would continue to receive their salaries despite having no place to work, and that he would rebuild the plant on that very site.

News accounts quoted him saying, “It would be unconscionable to put three thousand people on the streets and deliver a death blow to the city of Lawrence. Maybe on paper my company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you that it is worth more.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his book Living a Life That Matters, said acts like this occur when we see events and people from a point of view other than our own.

“The voice that commanded Aaron Feuerstein to rebuild Malden Mills, the voice that commands us to volunteer our time at a homeless shelter, the voice that urges us to put the needs and feelings of our family ahead of our own, is the voice of God,” he said.

When we do things for others, we are learning “to see the world from God’s point of view.”¹¹

Feuerstein decided he would “be there” for his employees and his community. It might have been easier to move the operation. It certainly would have been cheaper. He remained in town.

Sometimes we feel helpless when it comes to serving others because it seems that we can’t do anything. We have all heard others say “Don’t just stand there, do something.” That’s not always what people need. Often, they simply need someone to create space for them.

In other words, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”