Who is the other?
The other is you to me, and I to you.
It is every person.
It is the one put on display and the one hidden away.
The other is not who attracts me, but whom I meet and who saves me, because he awakens listening and trust in me.
At the root of every racism, every sectarianism, every hatred and every violence lies the refusal of the other—the one different from me.
To meet the other, we must abandon comparison. As long as I am "superior" or "normal," I signal that the other is "inferior" or "abnormal." And if one day I decide he bothers me or costs me too much, I will be tempted to destroy him.
Most of the time we meet people who resemble us, who share our ideas, who compliment us (and to give weight to these compliments we call them "intelligent" people).
We construct a small universe where the other becomes a mirror reflecting a flattering image of ourselves. If the image he gives us displeases us, we push him from our horizon. The world divides into those we "meet" and "the others."
Who among us has never felt this way?
I have found myself completely unprepared before people I did not expect. Their presence made me uneasy and seemed to choke away every capacity I had to truly meet them.
Then one day I noticed something shift in me. I stopped speaking of the other in medical, political, or pastoral terms.
Slowly fear gave way to trust.
The other became a brother, a sister.
Some years ago I was on a train headed to Germany.
Next to me sat a family with a small child. I wanted very much to play with him and hold him. But the train arrived in Strasbourg.
I got off and made my way to the waiting room—I had several hours to pass and it was night. Soon after, an unsteady man entered and sat beside me. He was completely drunk. I don't know if in "normal" times I would have let him sleep on my knees (normal time is often the time of selfishness and fear). But that evening, beyond what I saw and smelled in him, I knew there was in him a child more vulnerable than the one I had seen on the train not long before. He laid his head on my knees and slept that way until dawn.
To meet the other does not mean to choose him, but to choose to be chosen by him. When we speak of poverty, we usually think of that small poverty that allows us to fulfill ourselves without having to be born again. The moment poverty reveals itself as it truly is, it stuns us and we pull back with the best excuses: "Anything, but not this."
The poor always trouble us because they shake the edifice of certainties we have patiently built up, and they open for us the door to a liberation we do not yet want to have. To meet is to discover that we are present to one another, that we live for one another. Not only to look into each other's eyes and feel well together, but to look in the same direction and move forward as one.
At Fede e Luce we must be ready to be called into question by the presence of the poorest. Because of their thirst for love, as at Cana, they will lead us beyond our hesitations, beyond what we had foreseen and planned. They will open our hearts to the unexpected and to celebration.
Luis Sankalé