This picture from pre-covid times, I noticed only few days ago! It has haunted and acted on me like a radioactive drug used in PET scan to detect the dis-ease within!

“We need to enter the darkness, the night in which so many of our brothers and sisters live. We need to be able to make contact with them and let them feel our closeness, without letting ourselves be wrapped up in that darkness and be influenced by it.”

The above words of Pope Francis with one lung, gives an insight into the compassion which leads him to fraternal meetings with the ‘disfigured’ in our society .

All who suffer need not necessarily feel compassion. There are some who undergo a kind of transfiguration in passing through suffering. They become capable of a love that transforms the fear and aversion they undergo to empathy.

The words of an old hymn by Kurt Kaiser, echoes:

It only takes a spark to get a fire going

And soon all those around can warm up in its glowing

That’s how it is with God’s love once you’ve experienced it

You spread the love to everyone

And you want to pass it on

A wrestling was going on within me since sometime on how to accept a homeless person given shelter by my friend. It took a while to welcome him in my heart as a brother when I realized that I share the same homelessness and I have been shown mercy by so many!

I took time to enter the darkness and uncertainty he is going through and allowed myself to pass through it without reacting to the negative images of reports about him by others.

A new sense of love and freedom to relate grows in me as I took a small step to invite him to cut a cake gifted to me! It has become food for way forward.

As the preparation of Christmas season begin, I wish you a time to pause and move forward welcoming the faceless whom you meet.

Athithi Devo Bhava ! अतिथिदेवो भव:

Bandhu Bob