Sister Communities

We go about our daily life, engaged in activities that fall within the circle that encompasses us. What’s going on outside of that circle? In distant places villagers and city-dwellers lead a life very unlike our own. But they are connected to us in ways that we cannot know, economically and spiritually. We are splintered and dispersed throughout the world. If only we could find each other again, an ancient unity could be redeemed.

If friendship and love can be deep and lasting, maybe relationships between communities can also. Just as a human being can reach out to other human beings, connecting in a way that breaks through barriers of ethnicity, sex, and age, becoming a true friend, and expressing real love, the same can be done by communities. A community can reach out to another community far away. They may be separated by barriers of nationality, language, culture, and history--the whole way of life may be different--but if they share what is deep and essential, those differences may be overcome.
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Are We Responsible for Global Poverty?

What makes poverty possible? Every step along the way, one person must close his heart to another. The Spaniard, who refuses to turn on the water of the completed plumbing system of the cooperative; and the American philanthropist, who reneged on her promise to turn over the lands that the peasants were cultivating for her; the Managua officials, who drove the lake dwellers from their shantytowns, into a marginal existence at Nueva Vida, so that they could build expensive hotels; and we Americans, who flock to buy cheap goods, strung out on the high of unbelievable bargains, turning away from the process of sweat and blood, labor and desperation, which makes the bargains possible.

Spirit-failure. The withering of one's capacity for understanding, empathy, and inspiration. The corruption of innocence and the vulgarization of the sacred. The weighing of pluses and minuses, the heaping up of personal desires, growing so high and heavy that they crush the opportunity for pure and spontaneous action, which is a natural solution to all spiritual problems. The cunning, manipulative, and mechanical mind.
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Help Centers

Action Without Borders has initiated a program to begin ‘Help Centers’ in communities across the world. These centers are designed to bring together in a single location resources for those who want to help those in need, and to form a global network of these places.

More Reflections

"I must refuse to insult the naked by giving them clothes they do not need, instead of giving them work which they sorely need. I will not commit the sin of becoming their patron, but on learning that I had assisted in impoverishing them, I would give them a privileged position and give them neither crumbs nor cast off clothing, but the best of my food and clothes and associate myself with them in work." Gandhi. Article in 'Young India,' Oct. 13, 1921. (from The Gandhi Reader, page 229)

"The most urgent task is to destroy the myth that accumulation of wealth and the achievement of comfort are the chief vocations of man. How can adjustment to society be an inspiration to our young if that society persists in squandering the material resources of the world on luxuries in a world where more than a billion people go to bed hungry every night? How can we speak of reverence for man and of the belief that all men are created equal without repenting the way we promote the vulgarization of existence." Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 31. See pages 30-32, at least.

Why am I drawn to travel and work in faraway places? There is a rupture, which I want to heal. As I walk through crowded streets in exotic cities, I look as deeply as I can into the eyes of strangers, raised under conditions so different from my own. I want to see through the differences. That is because I feel that the difference that exist between people, and especially between faraway peoples, is the same as the division in my own soul. And that healing the division between peoples is the same as healing the division in my own soul, only more important, because the scale is so much greater, and so is the suffering.

Why is it so important to focus on poor countries? There are obvious reasons: suffering and need exists on a large scale there. It’s the personal reason, though, which addresses me: a persistent, subtle feeling of distress, which arises from the disjunction in my own psyche.

If we want healing, integrity, and happiness, we must look within and without. The distant reality impacts the inner reality. We are wounded, and one of these wounds is caused by a fracture in society, and one of these fractures is the division between rich and poor. The only way to heal our soul is to heal the rift between rich and poor.

This cannot be accomplished through material means, by charity or technical assistance. Charity only reinforces the rift, because it presupposes and depends on the existence of inequality and injustice. When assistance is simply a policy or program, based on an idea or theory, it has a certain coldness and aggressiveness to it.

The relationships we form must be equal. We are not the givers, or the takers. There is another form of relationship, which we can cultivate. The purpose of our centers and schools (if we create them), must be to cultivate, facilitate, promote and sustain authentic relationships. Direct, human understanding is the only way to heal conflict and injustice at its source. Any mutual work must be a spontaneous expression of that understanding.