Walking the Wall

“I did what I had to do because it was the right thing to do, that is all. We are all ordinary people, but even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can within their own small way turn on a small light in a dark room.”

Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and the others in the attic said these words to a group of teenagers in Long Beach, CA who had overcome racial and gang issues to find a connection with Anne Frank as portrayed in the movie Freedom Writers.

We are all called to be, and we are all capable of being, a small light in a dark room–it reminds me of what Mother Teresa said, “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”

Yesterday I was reading an article about Thich Nhat Hanh in the September 2007 of Shambhala Sun entitled “I Am Home” written by a filmaker, Velcrow Ripper, who followed Hanh’s trip back to Vietnam. Ripper is amazed and infused with the incredible love that Thay and the other members of his sangha exude. He first asks Phap An, one of Thay’s senior monks, what love is; then he asks Sister Chan Khong, an incredible woman and Buddhist nun who worked from the beginning with Thay in Vietnam. Finally he has the opportunity to ask Thay, who says, “First of all, it is loving-kindness, the capacity of offering joy, offering happiness, relief. The second element of true love in Buddhism is compassion. Compassion is the capacity of removing the pain and suffering in the other person. The capacity of helping him or her transform something inside. And the third element of true love is joy. …the last element of true love in Buddhism is equanimity, inclusiveness. you do not exclude anyone. No discrimination. This is the very element of true love. If you love in that spirt, you remain free. You will not suffer and you do not make the other people suffer. And when you have that kind of love within, everything you say, everything you do, expresses that love“.

In the end of the article he quotes Thay as saying, “Love is born from understanding. In order to understand, you have to take the time to look deeply and to listen deeply. If you have that kind of love, every word you say, everything you do, will be nonviolent, not as mere tactics but as an expression of your love. Understanding the suffering of the other person brings true love”.

This, in essence, is the lesson that the teenagers who went on to publish The Freedom Writers Diary learned. They stopped seeing only the differences in their races and started seeing the suffering they all faced, and outward from there the suffering of people far removed from then– and love was born in an unlikely place among unlikely people. Love wins, as Rob Bell put on bumper stickers all over Michigan and beyond. Love wins. While we may well wish for flood lights, we aren’t called to be floodlights, just a small light in a dark room.