Embodying the Christian message

I heard something so deeply meaningful on the radio this morning that I haven't yet fully digested it.  But I want to share it while it is still fresh and perhaps gain some insight by doing so.

The man being interviewed was Jean Vanier who founded an organization called L'Arche Communities. (You can find it here: https://onbeing.org/series/. I greatly recommend these podcasts.) In L'Arche Communities, which now are numerous and all over the world, mentally "disabled" and "normal" people live together without being labeled the way I just did. The whole point is love and  movement beyond the separation that is born of ideas about who is better or worse.

I'm not saying it the way Vanier did. This man is full of compassion -- it's in his every word and in his tone of voice. And what he said gave me just a glimpse of what has always puzzled me about Christianity: what is this dying on the cross thing about?

Weakness, vulnerability, and the willingness to suffer are what it's about, according to Vanier. It's the opportunity to let in another's suffering and know it as our own that allows us to become truly human.

I am reminded of something that happened to me long ago: I encountered a beggar on the street. Whereas I usually moved away in fear, this time I felt for some reason I wanted to give him money. I actually went to have coffee while I pondered this! I didn't want to give out of pity or out of an idea of what I "should" do. In the end, I decided that if I felt moved, I should give him something, just a small coin. Maybe I would find out why I wanted to do this in the doing of it.

When I dropped the quarter in his can, the man said "thank you." But it didn't feel like the "thank you" came from "over there" -- our of his mouth. It was as though the bottom fell out my mind, as though I'd fallen down an infinite well of consciousness where there wasn't any "here" and "there." Over the years, as I've experienced this in other contexts, I've come to understand it as the mind opening to the reality that we are not separate, except to the extent that our minds build a "thought barrier" to the "other." In that moment, it was as though the "thank you" came from me, but a much larger "me" than the one I usually knew myself as.

Still, even as I came the experience itself became less mysterious over the years, I always wondered why it happened specifically with this one person, a street person whom I didn't even know. I wrote to my spiritual teacher at the time about it. He responded, "YOU are a beggar." I recall not really liking that response very much. Now I'm wondering if he didn't see more deeply than I was able to follow.  It seems to have been a moment when I myself became the "poorest of the poor." I was not giving out of pity but because something in me -- not my ego or my rational mind but something deeper and purer -- responded with the universal love that comes out of the humanity we all share. This is what I heard in Jean Vanier this morning.