The Kebab

We do not live for ourselves only

Ms Kerry McCullough | Chaplain

A few years ago I heard a beautiful story from a young Iranian man, forced to flee Iran, and at that time an asylum seeker, living day to day, an uncertain future in Australia. His own story is deeply sad and disturbing, but this is the story he tells:

The southern part of Iran is a place which has great poverty and also struggles to find teachers willing to go into the schools there. While he was a university student Hamid decided that he would go south as often as he could and help out, teaching the children in one of the schools there. He soon became aware that the children were hungry. And as is the case when children are hungry, they could not concentrate or learn. So Hamid drew on his contacts and managed to organise food for the children in this particular school, each child being given a bowl of rice and two kebabs. The first day the children were given the rice and kebabs he noticed a commotion in the playground and saw teachers shouting at a little boy. When he walked over to see what was happening he found one of the boys had eaten only one of his kebabs and put the other into his pocket. The teacher was adamant that he should eat it at once and the little boy was just as adamantly refusing to take it out of his pocket. Hamid spoke to the boy who told him that his little sister at home had never had a kebab before and he was taking it home for her. There was no way he was going to relinquish the treasure in his pocket!     

In its beauty I found this a deeply moving story and a story of profound wisdom. Today this little boy is our teacher! He knew physical hunger and I am sure in that situation of poverty and need that hunger would have been great. But he was also able to look beyond his personal hunger and see himself in relationship. This good thing, this kebab, was not just for him alone! He remembered the hunger of his little sister. One hungry child remembering the hunger of another. And that drove him to put the kebab in his pocket to take it home to her and to stand up to those who got angry with him and told him to eat it and not to take it away with him. We can just imagine his excitement as he raced home at the end of the day with the kebab in his pocket, perhaps rather dried out and squishy by then, and in a gesture of love and triumph gave it to her. Love indeed! And if we take seriously the declaration of John in his Second Letter that “God is love and everyone who lives in love lives in God and God lives in them”, then this little boy surely shows us something of the face of God. His story reminds us of something at the heart of our Christian Tradition  -   we do not live for ourselves only. 

This year our Loreto Value is Justice. It’s timely for us to remember, as we reflect on Justice, that we live in community. We share life with others at a particular time and in a particular place. Originally humans lived and survived in tribal communities and in such communities the needs and wellbeing of the tribe, the community, took precedence. In fact, individualism was an unknown concept. The common good was what ensured the survival of the group. Tribal identity was what mattered. Working together and the good of the community were not ethical guidelines that had to be consciously chosen and worked at. That was simply the way it worked. Although relatively few communities on our planet today are tribal in nature, increasingly, through technological advances, we live in a worldwide community, a global ‘tribe’ we might say, in a very real sense. The joys and sorrows of each person, wherever they may be, are our joys and sorrows too, if only in the sense that communication brings them to our attention. What we do with that information of course is the heart of the matter. Information about issues such as poverty, natural and other disasters and the many areas of human need, coupled with the immediacy of this information, make it possible to respond to these issues in ways previously unimagined. And the exciting thing is that the individual, from his or her own home, is able to launch initiatives and appeals that change minds, begin worldwide movements, alter perspectives and provide material aid that brings relief in situations of crisis. In such a world we are called to understand ever more urgently what living in community really means and what it asks of us. We are learning day by day that our own flourishing, and indeed our own survival, increasingly depend on the survival of our world community. And, as the environmental crisis so powerfully brings home to us, this community extends beyond the human community.

There is a core African value known as ubuntu. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of several powerful voices speaking out against the evils of apartheid in South Africa in the last century,  describes ubuntu in this way: “what it means to be truly human, it refers to gentleness, to compassion, to hospitality, to openness to others, to vulnerability, to be available for others and to know that you are bound up with them in the bundle of life, for a person is only a person through others”. This value inspired and led the reformers of South Africa in those dark days. It is what drove them to offer themselves wholeheartedly to the struggle to bring about change so that all could live with the dignity of humanity in a society where life in its fullness was the norm for everyone and not just a few. This is the Christian understanding of love, to will the good of another. A mature moral conscience is grounded in this love. We are called to make moral decisions with a conscience that judges in terms of love. 

Another key figure of the day was Beyers Naude who was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, the church that supported apartheid. Naude, however, came to the realisation that he could no longer uphold this systematic destruction of human dignity, and he left his ministry. In 1962 in a sermon to his stunned congregation he said, “all people are called to love one another…the outcome of this love is that I should allow other people to have the same rights and opportunities as my group demands”. This is an ordinary Christian principle but at that time and in that context in a church which had played a significant role in the architecture of apartheid and had designed a theology to support it, it was radical and disconcerting for them. Naude shows us that any arrangement which insists that we find our identity in dissociation with others, in distinction, is simply not coherent with Christian life. 

This love we are called to is not a feeling. It does not wish others well from a distance but gets involved, rolls up its sleeves and is committed in a very real sense. When Desmond Tutu became archbishop of Cape Town in September 1986, he said that Christian love looks for the God hidden in human flesh: “If we take the incarnation seriously”, he said, “we must be concerned about where people live, how they live, whether they have justice, whether they are uprooted and dumped as rubbish in resettlement camps, whether they are detained without trial, whether they have a say in the decisions that affect their lives most deeply”.  Although he was speaking about the atrocities of apartheid South Africa his words could well be spoken to us today as we witness the atrocities of racial hatred, the hatred directed at people on the grounds of their sexuality, the disturbing sadness of internally displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers, those taking to the seas in desperation, the legacy of the atrocities committed in the name of colonisation and missionisation and the sufferings of Indigenous peoples. 

Ubuntu and love remind us that we are made for togetherness. This really asks something of us, just as it did for that little Iranian boy, looking beyond his own hunger to the well-being, and indeed the joy, of his sister.  

Mother Gonzaga Barry, writing over a hundred years ago in one of her letters to her ‘dear Loreto children’, captures well just what is needed for flourishing, for justice: “I want you now to turn your attention to the hundreds of poor, little neglected children in the large cities and towns of Australia whose fate is more to be deplored than that of the little victims of ‘famine fever’ referring to the potato famine in Ireland. I read the other day that within the last eight years, six hundred destitute children have been provided for by a society in Melbourne, not a Catholic one, and this chiefly through the instrumentality of one lady. Now if all our girls would ‘lend a hand’ and do a little to strengthen the hands of those who are trying to do all they can for the unfortunate children, we would see wonderful results. I heard also of a society formed of rich children; it has thousands of members in England, and as all these try and help less fortunate children, the amount of good done is very great, not only for the poor, but also to the rich who are taught from their earliest years to compassionate (sic) sufferings, to be kind and charitable and to live not for themselves only. Perhaps our Loreto children could form a similar association with the help of their parents. Think and pray about it my dear children”.

We do not live for ourselves only.