Friday, July 16, 2010

Couch Surffing in Calcutta: A Pespective on Ministry to the Marginalized

This post is by a friend of mine, Chris Heintz, who has attended the Vineyard Chattanooga since he was in the 8th grade.  Since graduating from high school Chris has been caught up in many an adventure for Christ.  He attended Christian college in California, has lived in a Christian communal setting, has had several neat experiences in other countries, and is now interning at monastery in Conyers GA.  Chris and I had coffee a couple of weeks ago where he shared with me his experiences with the Sister's of Charity in Calcutta India.  I thought what he shared was s interesting that I asked him to write it down so I could share it with you.

Two years ago I was given a plane ticket from my grandparents for my college graduation. A ticket to anywhere in the world. I had spent time in Europe and Japan while I was in high school and had seen how other cultures in the so called "first world" lived differently and how they lived similarly to those of us comfortably in the United States. But what I hadn't yet seen was the world most people lived in. The very world Jesus lived and died in. The world of the marginalized, the excluded, and the outcast. The world many of would prefer not to acknowledge. The world of the poor.


And so I decided to travel to Calcutta India to work with the Missionaries of Charity, the order that began with Mother Teresa. By the time the plane landed in India, I still didn't know exactly where I was going to stay those two months, but somehow I wasn't too worried. I finally connected with the Indian man I found online through couchsurfing.com who lived on the outskirts of Calcutta (or Kolkata, as it's officially called today) and was willing to let me stay with him. A stranger, willing to welcome me into his home. And all was well. At least where I would sleep.

That first day in Calcutta was about as much of a shock to the system as any place could have been. The kind that feels impossible to describe. People EVERYWHERE! Cars, mo-peds, motorcycles, rickshaws, buses, and taxis all happy to reduce the pedestrian population. All moving in mass anarchy to the constant honk of every horn. And trash... trash, everywhere. Calcutta could sometimes make Skidd Row in Los Angeles seem like a safe, quiet neighborhood to raise a family. For the first few days, the poverty was all I could see. You'd try to escape it in air-conditioned book stores or coffee shops, something, anything to give you a taste of home. But all you could taste sipping your latte as malnourished children would bang on the glass windows, begging for food, was your own guilt.

But I arrived in India precisely to see this. To see the world in all its reality. And what was beginning to stir in me was the reality of the Gospel. The reality of a God that would rather be born among the poor in ancient Palestine, in a filth covered manger, than in the palaces of Rome. That it was precisely to the weak and powerless, to those sick and in despair, to those shoved to the margins that Jesus said, "follow me".

After several days of trying to adjust to everything I was experiencing, I began working in Kalighat, the home for the sick and dying, there with the Sisters of Charity and volunteers from around the world.

I had heard stories of people, friends of mine, who had traveled to Calcutta to work with the Sisters in Mother Teresa's various "homes," and I came somewhat skeptical. I heard of how homes could often be flooded with volunteers who weren't really needed, who came to earn a badge or "check off" a life experience. I came with the (feeling) that the homes were more for volunteers than for the patients, and I heaped on it all the criticism I had gathered for "short term" missions. But what I experienced there was very far from what I anticipated.

It was a place unlike anything I'd ever experienced. It was a place of poverty and pain so real you could feel it inside your bones. But it was also a place permeated by the thick love of God. It was a picture of the church. A picture of the Kingdom of God. People literally from all over the world, speaking all different languages, came to serve the very people the world considered least. To bathe them, to dress them, to feed them, to wash their soiled clothes, to bandage their wounded bodies.

And God was there. There in the gentle hands of the Japanese man who cleaned the sick with soap and water, there in the West African nun who radiated with love and humility as she directed volunteers to the back to wash dishes or the roof to dry clothes, and there in the emaciated face of the Indian man too weak to feed himself. Here in a place of so much despair was the Kingdom of God breaking out. A sign of the Kingdom that will one day come.

Everyday was filled with so much beauty and so much pain. Every morning we would carry patients every bit as starved as images from Auschwitz. Many had bones exposed or limbs black with gangrene. The patients had no anesthetics except to squeeze our hands or to be held tightly against our chests as the nurse would clean their horrific wounds. And many mornings we would arrive to find patients who had become our friends, covered in white sheets.

One particular morning, there were four people that had passed through the night. One of the sisters pointed to me and three other volunteers to carry them out from the "cold room" onto the bus and to the crematorium. And so we carried them, first on a cold metal stretcher and then by our hands into the crematorium. Death. In our hands. Cold. Utterly lifeless. And we laid them on a platform and watched as they were slowly moved into the furnace.

It's an image burned into my memory. This was poverty. An empty, silent funeral with no one to mourn. Burned into ash with no hope of resurrection.

But here... it was here that Christ died. Beside the poorest of the poor, among the utterly abandoned, among the god-forsaken. I began to see how much it is that this is the God we worship.

Somehow by God's grace, after several days away to process through what I had experienced, I returned to work at Kalighat for several weeks until I finally returned home.

The transition from Calcutta to Chattanooga again was nearly as jolting as it had been when I arrived in India. But I had changed. I began to see things clearly that before I saw only in a blur. The poor. As I would read scripture, every passage about the poor and marginalized would jump out. It would come with the face of that little girl that tugged my arm for food. Or that older man I carried in my arms to bathe.

I began to see God's heart for the weak and invisible illuminating every page of scripture, as one of its most central themes. From the Exodus to the New Jerusalem. I began to see where it was and to who it was that we were called to proclaim the reign of God. To the sick, to beggars, to sinners, to the demon possessed, to the unclean, to children, to the poor. To the very people most shoved to the margins. I learned too, that this call to the margins meant not simply to "minister" to "them" at a distance, from above. But beside, as Jesus did. Remembering that we too are the sick our physician came to heal.

God doesn't call us all to Calcutta. But he does call us to our neighbors. Our lost, lonely, hurting, forgotten neighbors. Because the good news of the Kingdom of God, hope in the midst of despair, the hope of resurrection, is good news indeed.