OUR LOVE VACUUM

Several months ago, I spent an evening with a 91 year-old man that I had just met for the first time.  He invited me to his very beautiful home and, as he walked me through and introduced his family to me in the pictures all over his wall and his cabinets and desks, I was drawn to a picture of one of his grandsons, an attorney based in the Midwest.  The young man was leaning and praying over a name stone somewhere in Poland.  I asked questions about that picture, and then we talked about a picture taken with all of his children, and another that had his wife, himself and two granddaughters.  He informed me that his wife died 2 years ago – 3 weeks after that photograph was taken.  After answering my questions about that and other pictures, including one taken just with his wife, my host said in his soft voice: “Let’s go back and sit at the table”. 

As we walked back to the table, I remarked that he was a really blessed man to have such a successful family. Then he said: “I was also a very successful business man who made payroll for hundreds of staff every week….but what’s the use? In the end, what does anything amount to?”  In an emotional state, he discussed the loss of his wife and his loneliness despite frequent contacts by his family.  He opened a window for me into his life and I realized that, unlike anyone that I knew, his childhood was cut very short by a vacuum in man’s refusal to apply the Golden Rule that we love others as much as we love ourselves.  When I asked him about his childhood in Poland, his response hit me like a pack of bricks: “I’ve got a number”, he said, “do you want to see it?”  Without waiting for my response, he undid his left sleeve and showed me a tattooed number that, as a child, he was given in the Holocaust camp at Auschwitz. I was dumbfounded.  When I gathered myself, I told him that my son had visited a Holocaust camp in Austria(Mathausen) as a teenager and still would not discuss the experience.  “I was there in that camp too at age 13, then I was returned to Germanywhen I was 15”, my guest told me.

Is there anyone reading this article who has “a number”?  Is there any reader of this article whose life was forcefully wasted in a Holocaust camp for no reason other than his/her heritage?  I often forget that I was born and raised with privilege – a reality that I was reminded of when I traveled with my son to a few African countries last summer, including the country of my birth.  We (I included) spend so much time discussing the privileged status of others and we neglect to see that we might also be privileged in ways that are different.  If I saw that man before I got to spend time with him, I would have focused on the obvious aspects of his life, not knowing the less glamorous aspects of the road that he traveled.  So it is difficult for us to love as we ought because between us is a vacuum of knowledge that we as humans remain unwilling to bridge.  I do not believe what some would have us believe: that we lack the capacity to bridge that gap or to love.  Instead, I believe that we choose not to, partly because it seems easier to capitalize on differences either for personal or group gain than it is to let ourselves become humble and vulnerable enough to love those that we consider more or less privileged, different, offensive or less in status than us.

It is time to pray and work hard for our neighbors, our communities and our world to fill that vacuum that seems to be getting even wider due to what appears to be our diminishing willingness to love others.  Sometimes I desire to imagine a situation in which humanity loves with genuine zest, knowing that the night is far spent and that we have a responsibility to put on the armor of light to brighten a world that has become increasingly darker in my lifetime.  I know that this is wishful thinking at best, but knowing that does not prevent me from praying that God should grant us the wisdom, strength, courage and guidance to love one another as He desires.