In our Lent study we reflected on John’s gospel where the disciples are caught in a storm going across the sea to Capernaum, greatly afraid. Then they see this vision coming towards them. The wind’s howling, their little boat tossed by the overpowering waves, their lives in peril. In the distance they make out Jesus walking towards them on the water, yet another conjuring trick or miracle he’s doing just when they’re busy weathering the storm. He says simply to these men in their little boat, tossed about by the storm, ‘It is I, do not be afraid.’ This is one of those life-defining moments, there they were fearing for their lives, he pops us and says, ‘It is I, do not be afraid.’ This is when they were really tested, really called upon.
So what are the life-defining moments in your life, in mine, when each of us is called to be extraordinary, so that each of us could say to Jesus, ‘It is I, do not be afraid?’ I am taking Jesus’ statement and applying it to myself, asking you to take it home with you today and try it out. Jesus had his unique task to be the link between human beings and the divine being. What is my and what is your unique task, to match Jesus’ as he brought us in touch with our divine whole self. He kept saying, ‘The kingdom is now’, in this very moment.
As you keep in mind this question about your own unique task, I’m going to tell you about where I got this concept of ‘unique task’ from Viktor Frankl. He an Austrian doctor whose family including his wife aged 24 perished in the concentration camps, and he managed to survive three years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps. He emerged to become a famous psychotherapist, and developed logotherapy, where the Greek word ‘logo’ means ‘meaning’. He wrote many books, and his most famous is his first that he wrote to describe life in the concentration camps, his survival through ‘meaning’ and his development of logotherapy, how each person can find meaning. This book, written in 1945, is called ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. It is Viktor Frankl’s saying ‘It is I, do not be afraid’, his stand in life, his unique task.
Viktor Frankl says,
One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfilment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. …each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. To life he can only respond by being responsible.
Then Frankl goes on to say that the ‘true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system’. So we have a few elements here to help us look at ‘It is I, do not be afraid’ in our own searches for meaning and its expression in the world, for each of us our unique task.
I am going to turn now to my own case, what I see as my unique task, God’s fulfilling his promise to me for my time on earth. I say God fulfilling his promise to me as I feel I am drawn more and more by God, often kicking and screaming, along this path to saying and being ‘It is I’. I often have said, ‘why me?’ although I knew it was me.
I’m the eldest daughter of ten children born within 13 years, trained to be in charge, Mama’s helper from an early age. We lived in the segregated South in Texas, my father the son of Italian immigrants, my mother from a family of British origin, many generations in Texas. There were things I couldn’t understand as a child, the rift between my mother and her sisters for her marrying an Italian, why we had ‘white’ and ‘coloured’ water fountains and toilets, why there were no black children at our school.
Our family was different as we lived cheek by jowl, blacks and whites together, not segregated in my parents’ first business, four big rooming houses. I remember Maddie, the granddaughter of a slave who told me stories when I sat up late with her at her knees when she babysat. I remember how Andrew, a porter at a supermarket six blocks up the street, would wheel home a trolley of day old baked goods and limp fruit and vegetables saying, ‘Mr Foley got a lot of mouths to feed.’ They gave us children stories and food, their kindness has always stayed with me as well as my sense of social justice. My father was enraged that Andrew was left ‘like a dog’ on a hospital trolley for 36 hours waiting for treatment because he couldn’t pay until my father came to help him.
My father and his business partner prospered with their gas filling stations in the poor areas of growing Houston. They spotted a gap in the market to provide services in the poor area of growing Houston, and the African-Americans got the same pay as white employees, could be station managers in charge of whites. This was unheard of in other small businesses or the large ones that kept ‘whites’ and ‘coloureds’ separate, just like the water fountains and toilets. This was before the time of the civil rights movement and laws to promote equality.
My parents and their business partner in their ‘rough justice’ way were what we might now call ‘social entrepreneurs’, nothing fancy, they knew what was the right and the smart thing to do. My parents taught us all ten of us to be responsible, to be members of a team, to look after one another. They left me, almost aged 15, in charge of all ten of us when they came to Europe from our home in Texas in 1956 for an American Bar Convention. When introduced to Prince Philip at the Queen’s Garden Party with the words, They left their 10 children at home looking after themselves’, Prince Philip remarked, ‘I certainly couldn’t do that with ours’.
I got culture shock going from Texas to Boston, aged 18 to attend the same prestigious women’s college as did Hilary Clinton. I saw the gap between rich and poor in South Boston and in Mexico City where I worked in slums during vacations. After college, I had a life-defining experience as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala in Central America the mid 1960s. I worked with Mayan women to found the first women’s weaving group in Guatemala, producing a new source of livelihood and status for women. The women wove these purses based on the design of their traditional blouses. We took them to the capital to sell, were stared at for being Mayan women with a ‘gringa’, a foreigner. The business became a success, it was the ‘right’ and ‘smart’ thing to do, empower women through economic gain and social impact.
Our contact and friendship has lasted for over 40 years and I know first hand the massive impact that enterprise with a social mission has on people’s lives. This was not charity, it was the opportunity for people to work, to be on a team and learn. Since then I have been searching for ways to recreate conditions for empowerment through learning, enterprise and community.
Since Guatemala I’ve been involved with education, media at the BBC and in Germany, and have now come full circle to microfinance, my work since 2000, a way of empowerment through business.
Microfinance is the provision of small loans, insurance, savings, remittances to poor people so they have a way of getting out of poverty. The modern version was started by Prof Mohamed Yunus in 1974 during a famine in Bangladesh. He saw that $27 lent to 42 poor families could get them out of the hands of money lenders and give them a start. When banks turned him down for loans for poor people, Prof Yunus founded Grameen or Community Bank, and they won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in empowering women, an unexpected social benefit from microfinance. 2005 was the UN Year of Microcredit and I was the coordinator for the UK’s National Committee.
I see my work with microfinance and livelihood development as God fulfilling his promise to me, a way to recreate that life-enriching and life- changing experience I had in the 60s with my Mayan women friends. Today my small organisation, Microfinance without Borders, is working with an innovative microfinance institution in Kenya, helping them to be a centre of excellence in Africa. This microfinance institution was started by a Swedish woman and 50 beggars from the largest slum in Nairobi and now has 200,000 members, has built a housing project 60 km outside of Nairobi with 2000 houses and community infrastructure at 10% of the normal cost. They also helped resolve conflict after the post-election violence in Kenya, involving the youths who looted and burned down a market in rebuilding it. Those young men are now microfinance members, running their own businesses and have a stake in society where they were previously excluded.
The graduates from our courses in microfinance here in London do field work with Jamii Bora Trust, this microfinance organisation. We work together with them to develop new learning materials for their 200,000 members and will be training trainers.
I have come full circle, back to my roots in enterprise with a social mission, see my unique task as working together with people at the grassroots, just as I started out in Guatemala. Microfinance without Borders works together with microfinance organisations to spot opportunities to fulfil a social and environmental purpose while having a sustainable business.
This is empowerment in the deeper and higher sense, how we can create a just society that uses the lessons from our current breakdown, our insights into the folly of greed so we each do our part, find our unique task. It’s no good blaming the bankers, it’s all of us in the top 2% of the world who have turned a blind eye to the 2 billion on less than a dollar a day, the people in our communities here in the UK who need the stories and the enrichment just as Maddie and Andrew gave to me as a child. We are also in peril, in our boats tossing on the sea when we choose to ignore the warning signs and those who come towards us asking us to contribute as Jesus did, saying ‘It is I, do not be afraid’.
I now come back to Viktor Frankl, who wrote in 1945 during his recovery from the concentration camps, his major work, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’
everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. …each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life. To life he can only respond by being responsible.
We go back to that boat on the Sea of Galilee, the disciples being tossed about by the storm; they see a vision in the distance. They get really shaken when Jesus walks towards them and says ‘It is I, do not be afraid.’ They know they are being asked to go deeper, to go higher in their mission. This is more than a storm, this is calling them beyond that moment to a life of contribution.
So if we today meet Jesus, the link between the human being and the divine being, what do we say? Jesus may appear as the Big Issue seller on the corner, maybe she’s the child in the classroom who needs someone to listen to her read, maybe he’s the person who looted and burned down a market in Kenya in the post election violence and then helped to rebuild it, got a loan for his business from microfinance, now he’s included in society. Maybe it’s the person knocking on the door of the Connection at St Martin’s who then gets connected in society again, maybe for the first time.
So when we meet Jesus in any of these people, will each of us be living as our unique task on earth, will each of us be able to look Jesus or any of his forms in other people in the eye and say, ‘It is I, do not be afraid.’ ?
No comments:
Post a Comment