26th
A Suffering Christ in a City of Joy
I’m in Chennai with a few friends, visiting my old neighbors and the children here cared for by Word Made Flesh.
Tonight after finishing our dinner at Saravanna Bhavan, we ordered chai and coffee while discussing our thoughts on the book, The City of Joy.
It’s the story of a collision of two men’s lives in a Calcutta slum. One man, an Indian from a rural village ends up in the city trying to find a better life for his family. Tragically, he ends up spiraling further and further into the clutches of poverty, eventually finding home in a slum. The other man, a Polish Catholic priest, voluntarily chooses poverty and in a gesture of solidarity and moves into the same slum as the Bengali farmer.
While studying in Jerusalem back in 1992, a Ugandan Bible translator gave me his copy of The City of Joy. Perhaps more than anything I had read up to that point in my life, this book changed me. The thick paperback story of courage and hope hidden in the folds of oppression and suffering disturbed me.
Suddenly, the reality of poverty took on an embodied and humanized face. Flipping through these pages illuminated the complexities of poverty not as the experience of an individual, rather that of a community. The commitment and solidarity of the priest with the slum community challenged my own willingness to sacrifice and submit to the suffering of the world. The sad and real cycle of poverty, hopeless and fatalistic, seemed a daunting challenge, yet an invitation to hope for an end to it all.
I was overwhelmed. I was devastated. I was filled with compassion. I was inspired.
One of my favorite parts of the book happens to be an exchange with a man in the slum who goes to visit the priest.
One morning two bearers set down a bearded man whose shaggy hair was covered with ashes. He was attached to a chair. He had no legs and no fingers on his hands. He was a leper*, yet his young face radiated a joy that was astonishing in one so disinherited.
“Big Brother, my name is Anouar,” he announced. “You must look after me. As you can see, I’m very sick.”
His gaze alighted next on the picture of the Shroud of Christ.
“Who is that?” he asked, surprised.
“It’s Jesus.”
The leper looked incredulous.
“Jesus? No, it’s can’t be. He doesn’t look like he usually does. Why does your Jesus have his eyes closed and look so sad?”
Stephen Kovalski knew that Indian iconography reproduced images of Christ in abundance, but those of a Christ with blue eyes, triumphant and brightly colored, like the gods of the Hindu pantheon.
“He has suffered,” said the priest. “His eyes are closed, so that he can see us better,” he went on. “And so that we, for our part, can look at him more readily. Perhaps if his eyes were open, we wouldn’t dare to, because our eyes are not pure, nor are our hearts, and we carry a large share of the responsibility for his suffering. For if he is suffering it’s because of me, you, all of us; because of our sins, because of the evil that we do. Still he loves us so much that he forgives us. He wants us to look at him. That’s why he closes his eyes and those closed eyes invite me, too, to close my eyes to pray, to look at God inside me…and inside you too. And to love him. And to do as he does and forgive everyone and love everyone, especially those who suffer like him, they invite me to love you who are suffering like him.”
A little girl in rages who had remained hidden behind the leper’s chair came forward and planted a kiss on the picture, caressing it with her small hand.
“Ki Koshto! How he must suffer!” she murmured, after touching her forehead with three fingers.
The leper seemed to be deeply moved. His dark eyes were shining.
“He is in pain,” Stephen Kovalski went on, “but he doesn’t want us to weep for him, but rather for those who are suffering today, because he suffers in them, in the bodies and hearts of the lonely, the abandoned, the despised, as well as in the minds of the insane, the neurotic, and the deranged. You see, that’s why I love that picture. Because it reminds me of all that.”
The leper nodded his head thoughtfully. Then, raising his stump in the direction of the icon, he said, “Stephan Daddah, your Jesus is much more beautiful than the one in all our pictures.”
[Dominique Lapierre, The City of Joy (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1985) pages 156-157]
The suffering Christ. God’s identification with those who are poor. The social consequences of injustice of sin. All of these are invitations to a contemplative posture that allows God to break our hearts as a sign and symbol of hope.
Tonight, here in Chennai, it rained. Hard. My rainbow sandals got wet. The back of my shorts got spattered and stained with mud from the city’s streets. I was frustrated.
That is, until the suffering Christ reminded me that in this city thousands and thousands of people don’t have shelter to protect themselves from the rain. Tonight, the countless men and women, girls and boys who sleep on the streets have no place to go.
Tonight, Christ suffers with them. For them. Through our prayers and our obedience, may we seek to be the answer to someone’s prayer. Tonight, could we find the courage to restore hope to those who have every reason to give up. Tonight, is it possible to follow the oppressed and those who are poor, to God’s heart.
For it is there that we together are saved.
*In this instance I quote directly from the text, however, I have made it a principled practice to avoid using the term “leper” as it typically is loaded with derogatory insinuations as well as has been co-opted to describe much more than a person’s physical condition. I also am aware of the WHO’s (World Health Organization) efforts to eradicate this term from colloquial usage and use more accurate language such as “persons with leprosy” or “persons with Hanson’s Disease.”
