Monday 21 March 2016

How kindness transcends everything: a real-life example.

When I was a young woman, I didn't have my life sorted - surprise, surprise!
I tried as well as I could to make sense of everything, manage meaningful and less meaningful relationships, and failed as often as I succeeded.

During that time, a family that wasn't mine opened their heart and their house to me.
They welcomed me whenever I asked. They lived in a very large, semi-renovated house in Normandy, had 5 children of their own (aged between 1 and 8 when I met them the first time) and were busy people.

Yet, whenever I phoned them to ask "can I come to visit?" the answer was always "yes, of course!". When the guest room that I eventually considered as my own was already occupied, they would make up a bed in the office. Once I slept in one of the kids' rooms, when even the office was already taken.

She would pick me up from the train station (my first experience of people-movers, as the five kids of course had to come along) and take me home.

Often there were other, always interesting people at the dinner or lunch table; sometimes their family, most of the time friends or people in need of connection, like me.

The food would be in the french tradition of entree, main, cheese and dessert. Nothing fancy usually, but healthy. After some months/years, I would feel so much at home that I would often cook - not that I was brilliant at it, but it just wasn't their main talent let's say.

What was their strong point was their unwavering welcome. I wouldn't compare myself to a stray cat (actually cats were not too welcome in their house, their only fault) but if I was not lost, then at least I hadn't found myself yet.

They would love me as I was, opening their house, and their hearts me. Why? Well, because that was the kind of people they were, and possibly also because of their Christian faith.

And that is my point today. They were very catholic. So much so, that they would travel quite a bit every Sunday to go to mass in a church that offered mass in Latin (none of that "new-fangled Vatican II idea" of mass in French for them). I never went with them and they never expected me to.

They had certain views on what was the right thing to do (I'm pretty sure my boyfriend stories were not quite what they were expecting for their children). Some people may have thought of them as "fundamentalist Catholics". Yet always in my often robust discussions with them (I loved playing the devil's advocate even then) they displayed tolerance and love. Their arguments would be well-thought through, never dogmatic, often convincing.

More than that, the life they were leading, the way they lived their faith in a tradition of welcome to anybody who needed their hospitality or their help, told me so much more about them than their preference for mass in Latin.

To me, they embodied the greatest aspect of Christian tradition: loving the other, as different as "the other" may turn out to be. (I have met others, Muslims, who live by the same tenet, but that is a story for another post).

My point is that those people were living in a way that added greatly to the general store of goodness in this world; and as much as their religious convictions were important to them, their lived tolerance was more important than dogma.

I can't say I quite live up to their example. My "do-gooding" always remained small-scale.
But whenever I feel desperate about the state of this world, I remember how one family made a difference in the lives of many, mine amongst others. And it gives me hope about the future.