Did you see?

You cannot see anything from the road. More strictly speaking, all you see is an ordinary village. Boys run out to meet you, each begging that you choose him as a guide... My guide's name was Tadesse Mirele and he was a schoolboy. His school was closed, everything was closed - there was famine... Tadesse said taht he hadn't eaten anything in several days... "Sir?" "Yes, Tadesse?" I replied, "I'm listening." "Be my helper, please! I need a helper!" He looked at me, and I saw then that he had only one eye. A single eye in the haggard, frightened face of a child.

A while later Tadesse suddenly grabbed me by the arm. I thought that he wanted to ask me for something, but then realized he was only preventing me from falling into a chasm. For just below was a church carved out of stone...so that Muslims invading these lands could not spot them from afar...

"Look, sir!" said Tadesse, pointing down to the courtyard in front of the Church of the Savior of the World... A dozen or so meters below where we stood, in teh yard and on the steps of the church, surged a crowd of lame beggars... The people below were so tightly squeezed together, their crippled limbs, stumps, and crutches so tightly intertwined, that they formed a single crawling mass, out of which dozens of arms stretched upward like tentacles, and, where there were no limbs, innumerable gaping mouths extended upward, waiting for something to be thrown into them. As we walked from one church to another, this gnarled, moaning, expiring creature below crept after us, and from it dropped every now and then an inert, already lifeless member, abandoned by the rest.

There had been no pilgrims here in a long while, to throw down their alms, and these cripples were unable to get out of the stony chasms.

"Did you see, sir?" Tadesse asked me as we made our way back to the village. And he said it as though to suggest he thought this the only thing really worth seeing.


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This is an excerpt from The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski. A true story. It's a book that greatly impacted me, though reading through it again reminds me of things I've forgotten. I find it so powerful that his guide, who wants to make sure he saw, has only one eye. And that before the boy asks for a helper, Ryszard tells him he is listening. Makes me ask myself if I see, if I listen. I wonder about, as pilgrims, how we sometimes think we are going to places like the Church of the Savior of the World to meet God in places of beauty, only to find him in places of suffering.

God, give us new eyes and new ears, so that we may find you in the people all around us and in our moments of pain as well as joy, in the shadows as well as in the sunlight. Amen.