It is dusk on Christmas Eve, and we are leaving our room with a handful of friends to go caroling around our neighborhood.  We carry candles, and as we stop at each house and in each alleyway, we hand out candles to those who gather around and they join us as we continue to make our way around the neighborhood: a growing, candlelit mob.  Most of the crowd is made up of energetic children who are thoroughly enjoying the music and the novelty of having their own personal flames to carry around.  Eventually, everyone’s noise and excitement begins to drown out the singing, and I burst out laughing in the middle of “Silent Night” because of the utterly un-silent night unfolding around me: kids fight over the now-scarce candles, adults swat at them and yell for them to be quiet, and everyone is jostling for position in the narrow alleyway where we’re standing as more and more curious onlookers gather and add to the din of voices.  “All is calm, all is quiet,” I manage to sing out before the irony of the situation overwhelms me with laughter.  Actually, all is chaos.

          At the time, A and I were both thinking about what an unconventional Christmas this was.  In hindsight, the whole thing was quite fitting— what better way to remember Jesus’ humble birth in an obscure Palestinian town than by walking the dirt pathways of this forgotten corner of the world, past goats and cows and pigs and the simple homes of some of the first people to whom Jesus would probably choose to reveal himself if he were to be born again in our century?
  
          It’s not as though Jesus was born into a peaceful, quiet world anyway.  On that night when Christ was born, his homeland was under violent occupation by a foreign military, a zealot insurgency was going on, and before he hit the age of two, he and his parents would become refugees fleeing a genocide. He was born into a highly stratified society where the wealthy exploited the poor, and where racial, ethnic, and religious divisions fragmented the population (Romans, Jews, Samaritans, “sinners”…). 

          The more I think about it, the more appropriate the Christmas Eve ruckus of our neighborhood seems.  Jesus didn’t wait for our chaos to subside, for all to become peaceful and for every heart to prepare him room before he came.  He just came to us in the midst of our chaos. He spoke his peace over us even while we ignored and misunderstood him, and began to bring a new world into existence within the shell of the old. 

          The past week has been intense.  Last week Andy and I started volunteering at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying.  The home is usually located next to Kalighat (the temple of Kali, Hindu goddess of death and patron deity of this city), but that facility is under renovation so the patients have been temporarily moved to another location, near another home for people with less serious illnesses.  We were totally unprepared for it.  Many of the patients there look like holocaust victims, like living skeletons.  Many have gory wounds; many are mentally ill; some are missing, fingers, toes, or limbs.  The first day, I was overwhelmed by the horrible condition people were in.  I didn’t know where to look, and I felt awkward dressing and undressing strangers and helping them with bedpans.  There’s no training—you just grab an apron and jump right in, relying on other volunteers to give you advice.  People come from all over the world, so they don’t necessarily share a common language, and some of them stay for months at a time while at least one person each day is volunteering for the first time.
          Neither of us was exactly sure how to do anything.  I felt entirely useless and incompetent for the first two days as we struggled to learn how to accomplish the basic tasks of washing patients’ clothes in huge basins, distributing medicine, feeding and toileting people, and numerous other things.  We both had some unsettling experiences.  On the first day, some new patients were brought in from the street.  I (Andy) was asked to help bath an older man who was brought in.  He was sitting stiff as a board in a plastic chair.  His head was hanging over the back of the chair.  Someone else had already taken off his pants so that he was just sitting in a diaper and an old shirt.  It was hard to support him as I tried to get his shirt off because he was so stiff that he couldn’t sit properly in the chair.  Every time I tried to support or move his arm he would let out a muffled gasp.  After we finally got him undressed, we moved him onto a ledge where he could lay as we bathed him.  Before we could even start cleaning him, he stopped breathing and the Indian guy I was helping called for a Sister to come.  She quickly grabbed a bottle of Holy Water and splashed it on his head, eyes, and chest.  We began to pray fervently for him asking that God would have mercy on him.  He took one last breath, and then his heart gradually stopped beating and he was gone.   I asked if we could do CPR but the Sister said that he was too far gone, he would need a ventilator to survive.  And so he died, naked in the arms of people he didn’t even know.  A couple minutes after he died we began cleaning his body.  It was like cleaning a skeleton with a rag.  He was certainly old, but I am sure that starvation was a major contributor to his death.  I prayed as I cleaned, praying for mercy.  I didn’t know what else to pray.  We then put him on a stretcher and put a sheet over his body.  I don’t know his name or anything about him.  I am honored though to have seen his face and be able to remember him in my heart, even if no one else will ever know how or where he died.
          On the second day, I (Trudy) was helping to distribute medicine and ended up giving medication to the wrong person.  People have beds with numbers, but they aren’t always on their beds, and the directions about who gets what are sometimes vague.  I had been told to take this particular concoction to a blind woman in the corner with such-and-such a name.  Well, I found the woman in the corner.  She seemingly responded enthusiastically to her name, and the other details slipped out of my mind– she seemed to be tracking my approach with her eyes, but maybe she was partially blind?  There was no one around to ask.   As she was finishing her medication a sister walked past and exclaimed that this wasn’t the right person!  A wave of numbness washed over me.  What had I given her?  A big scene ensued.  Several of the sisters crowded around the woman, making her drink glass after glass of water either to make her throw up or to flush her system, I’m not sure which.  She was making helpless, pained noises, and each of her cries fell on me like a hammer.  I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I felt so guilty, so stupid, so utterly angry at myself.  Halfway through the morning at chai break, I was ready to jump in an autorickshaw and leave.  “I can’t do this,” I told Andy.  “I’m useless here.”  He wisely suggested that I go and talk to the sisters.  I was afraid to face them, but I did—crying and apologizing for my mistake.  They were extremely comforting and gracious.  “Oh, don’t cry!” said one of them, wrapping me in a bear hug.  “She is alright!  Humans make mistakes, it could happen to anyone.”  She led me by the hand to the woman who had taken the medicine.  She was back to her usual self, which I learned is a noisy state even when she isn’t in pain.  I just sat on the floor with her for awhile, stroking her back and telling her how sorry I was, though I’m sure she had no idea what I was saying. 
          After that, things got better.  Andy and I both adjusted to being at Kalighat.  It became easier for us to center ourselves on prayer and to interact with the patients as normal people.  I opted out of more technical tasks in favor of just sitting and praying with the women, massaging their shoulders and their hands and their atrophying legs, and singing to them.  We both began to recognize Jesus in the faces of the feeble people around us, and He spoke to us about His own helplessness and poverty on the cross.  The way that we needed to humbly submit to these weaker neighbors in order to care for their basic needs called to mind the way that Jesus submitted to us by lowering himself from the position of powerful Creator to powerless creature, and by even submitting to a painful, scary, shameful death at the hands of humans he could have wrathfully obliterated in an instant. 
          We also learned about the powerlessness that Jesus subjected himself to.  We love to be competent, to have control, to have something to DO in order to solve problems or to fix things.  But over and over again, we have been faced with incredible pain and we have no idea what to do.  We have a huge language barrier, we have no experience with caring for the elderly or for people who are dying, and it is often difficult to be faced with so much pain and to realize that there is no way to “fix” most of them; we can only help them to die well.  The juxtaposition of hideous and disgusting physical realities with beautiful and lofty spiritual realities also illuminated for us the paradox of compassion.  Everyone admires the beautiful compassion that Mother Teresa personified, but we rarely picture her doing the dirty work of scrubbing poop out of dirty clothes, cleaning bedpans, or hand-feeding rice and lentils to toothless grandmothers.  Those are precisely the things that the Missionaries of Charity are doing every day!  And it is the accumulation of all of those small, mundane, and even distasteful tasks that creates a life of beautiful, selfless love.
          No one was miraculously healed, but even in that dimly-lit, primitive ward, we experienced the Kingdom of God as it crashed down to earth.  Widows and orphans and throwaway, forgotten, neglected, social outcasts were cared for and respected and their well-being was prioritized above all else.  Life is truly in that place.
          And then the other thing happened.  It is a half hour walk from Mother House, the MC convent, to the place where we volunteer.  Most of that walk is along narrow alleys and side streets filled with pedestrian, rickshaw, and auto traffic, and the in the final stretch we cross a set of railroad tracks and walk alongside them to one of the local train stations.  Day before yesterday, there was a group of people from YWAM with us, and it was their first day to volunteer.  As we walked along the sidewalk beside the tracks, we came to a place where a stairway takes up most of the sidewalk and leaves only a narrow space between piles of trash on one side and the train tracks on the other.  Andy and I were walking next to each other, and as the horn of an approaching train blared, Andy hurried the two of us through that little bottleneck.  Since we had seen how all of the locals continued to walk casually alongside the tracks as trains approached, we didn’t think that the sidewalk could actually be that dangerous but we just felt uncomfortable cutting it quite that close.  At this point, our group was spread out along the length of the platform and there were more volunteers walking further behind us.  As the train whizzed past, I was surprised to notice how close the train does come to the sidewalk—the trains here are much wider than they are in China.  Andy turned around just in time to see someone caught by the side of the train, and to watch as their body was whipped around to the front of the train and dropped onto the tracks.  Facing forward, I saw a white leg bumping along the tracks underneath the front of the train and had the sickening realization that there was a human body being crushed underneath the wheels.  We froze in shock for a moment, then we were sprinting down the platform at least fifty yards, to where the train finally came to a stop.  I was praying out loud over and over again, hardly even able to think, “Lord have mercy!  Lord have mercy!  Lord have mercy!”  We saw a crumpled body underneath the train and were shocked again to see a hand raising up weakly and then dropping again.  I couldn’t believe this person had survived, and I was horrified to think that they had endured the whole ordeal with full consciousness and were now going to die slowly on the tracks.  Right away Andy rushed toward the train and disappeared from view as I was enveloped in a surging crowd of Indians.  I was slowly realizing that the person under the train was one of the volunteers.  His teammates were hysterical, yelling and crying, and I was feverishly praying out loud and crying shocked tears, too. An Italian doctor who had been volunteering with us also jumped down to the train to help.
Down on the tracks, Andy struggled to quiet the yelling crowd enough to communicate to the guy under the train.  “Where can you move?  Should we pull you out from the front or from the side?”  The nineteen-year-old tried to move his leg and cried out in pain.  Andy could see the end of his cracked bone sticking out of his thigh.  The driver mercifully spoke English, and they were able to get him to move the train a little bit to get it off of the guy’s leg.  Then an Indian man pulled him out from the front of the train, and Andy helped to carry him back up to the sidewalk.  He cringed to have to lay him down in the filthy mud, but there was nowhere else to put him. 
          Separated from the others and unable to see Andy over the heads of the yelling mob that had formed on both sides of the tracks, I was worried about where he was.  When I saw them moving the train, I was just praying that he wasn’t underneath it.  I was relieved to see him back on the platform, and I pushed my way over to the crowd of volunteers to help literally shove the surging crowd backwards and make an open space around David.  Though the train had ripped the shirt off of his body, his head and torso looked remarkably unscathed.  There was blood but no deep cuts anywhere I could see.  The Italian doctor made a tourniquet out of someone’s shirt and started to stem the bleeding.  Andy yelled for someone to go get a sister, and I sprinted down the rest of the platform and into Kalighat, yelling for help.  By the time I came back with the nuns, a stretcher had already been sent ahead of us to carry the guy to a three-wheeled cart where he was pushed to the nearest hospital for treatment.  Andy was nowhere to be found, so another volunteer and I enlisted the help of one of the Indian men in the crowd to take us in the direction of the hospital.  On the way, we ran into Andy who was coming back from putting the guy in the cart.  The three of us returned to Kalighat and prayed together on a bench.  As we were sitting there, staring ahead, one of the men in the ward who had lost an arm in a train accident a month before came over and explained by signs that the same thing had happened to him, and he expressed his empathy for the young guy who had been hit and his sympathy for us.  There were hardly any volunteers left in the ward, and we realized that the whole place was full of people like this man—broken bodies and broken spirits in need of care, each of whom had experienced tragedy similar to what we had just witnessed.  We decided to stay on for our usual morning shift, and we set about washing clothes and feeding patients as usual.  The frequent sound of passing trains eerily replayed the scene from earlier again and again in our minds, but it was good to have work to do. 
          After we finished, Andy and I took a shoe and some headphones that had been left on the tracks to the leader of the YWAM team.  We found out from him that the guy’s right leg had been amputated and that he was in critical condition and currently having scans of his brain and internal organs done.  Since then we have heard that his brain scan has come back clear, and he has been transferred from the very primitive government hospital where he was originally taken to a better one.  Please continue to pray for him, that his body would be safe from infection, and for God to help him psychologically and emotionally as he comes to terms with the loss of his leg and begins the long process of recovery.
          Kolkata has been called the City of Joy, and at times it is difficult to see why.  This is a place that is full of life and of death, coexisting alongside each other in frightening proximity and striking contrast.  There is the energy of the people, the traffic, the conversations; the brightly printed saris, the brightly painted houses, the locals’ love of art and music and politics and poetry.  And then there is the terrible poverty, the naked children on the street, the rats running along the road or smashed on the pavement; there is the hopeless, haunted look in the eyes of the starving.  And yet… at Kalighat and in this young man’s life, we see also the mercy of God and His miraculous intervention.  We see His joy subverting the hopelessness against all odds, and we have to believe that even here, there is a glimmer of the joy that is to come.

          In the course of our conversations today, T helped me to identify an area of personal growth.  It is something that many people would defend as a good thing, it is culturally valued.  It is the need to be independent.  The ability to function without a lot of outside support is certainly valuable at times; I don’t think it is healthy to be co-dependent or in a state of denial about personal responsibility. But our obsession with being independent can be crippling in the Christian life because independence isn’t a Jesus value.  He didn’t say that we should come to God by ourselves– instead we are to come through him.  He is our way, our only way.  In the community that he establishes among the disciples there is a strong thread of dependence on the Divine.  He sends them away on missions from time to time, but their source is Christ (and they still had at least one other partner).  And when he finally ascends to heaven, he only leaves them alone for a couple days before sending their Helper.  Jesus gives them a helper because he knows that they cannot be independent. 
          Beyond the dependency that Jesus establishes between his followers and the Divine, he also establishes a healthy interdependency among the members of the community.  In some mystical way we are forgiven when others forgive us and they are forgiven when we choose to mediate the forgiveness of God to them (John 20:23).   Talk about interdependency!  Perhaps if we internalized this mystical truth, the division that is so tenacious in the Church would not be able to exist.  And that is just one element of the dependency.  We are also dependent on the gifts that God has given to each member of the Body.  It wouldn’t be a body if there were two billion eyes. That would be a disturbing monster.  Instead, he gave us all abilities that only function well when in cooperation with the rest of the Body.  The muscle cells are only important because they are attached by tendons to the bones.  Taken in isolation (or independently), each part of the body is interesting but bizarre and irrelevant without the tapestry of the whole.  Have you ever just stared at an eyebrow?  It looks normal on a face, but if you look at it in exclusion from the rest of the face it is a hairy, frightening thing! 
          I know all this in theory.  I love the theology of interdependence; I talk about it all the time.  However, I am an absolute beginner in the practice of interdependence.  I snub the help of others in an effort to proclaim my own greatness as an independent eye brow.  It is completely arrogant to think that I can be in community with God and others without accepting their help in humility.  So I guess this is a public confession of that arrogance and pride.  I am a man who is desperately broken, so broken that I don’t even understand my own limits, the limits of interdependence that God has placed around me to mature me.  Please forgive me that I may be forgiven and pray that I will pursue the interdependence that Christ modeled so well.  Pray that I will, in humility and with thanksgiving, accept the help of others. 

          We’ve now finished up our first week of “normal” life on our new schedule. What does a typical day or a typical week incude, you might ask? The short answer is, we still aren’t sure! This week incuded hours of discussion with our future teammates about the practicalities of forming a team, and our convictions, methods, strengths, weaknesses, and hopes and dreams for our life together in Asia. Lots of prayer. Cooking for large groups of people. Working as a team on a project related to human trafficking. Working with a Creative World Justice group to brainstorm ways of addressing exploitation of workers on the cruise ships that frequently dock within a mile of our neighborhood. Babysitting the children in our community. Getting up early or staying up late to talk with prostituted women and people in addiction. Beginning to struggle through the Hindi alphabet and the unfamiliar sounds of vowels and consonants that our brains haven’t been trained to distinguish between. Enjoying a date night with a 40-minute walk to the closest Burmese restaurant 🙂  On top of all that, A. did some mechanic work and I found myself haphazardly swept into a protest march of several hundred people.
           There has been a lot of excitement and a lot of new experiences and great conversations over the past two weeks. However, after having lived in this community for a month we are also beginning to feel the strains and the uncomfortable realities of the communal life– things that we didn’t dwell on at length during our college years of dreaming about radical hospitality and intentional community. Sometimes it’s hard to find a quiet space or a place to be alone. But uppermost in my mind is the loss of control that we’ve experienced since moving here. Our community lives primarily on donated food. To demonstrate how wasteful the macrosystem of food production really is, we receive food from homeless shelters that have been given too much food to use– and of the donated food that we receive, a lot of the fruits and vegetables go bad before we’re able to use them (a lot of what we get is already expired).   Being at the bottom of the food chain for the first time, we have the chance to see just how much food is continually produced only to be thrown away each day… the food chain is a lot more inefficient than we thought.
          We’re very blessed to have access to so much free food, but in this new situation we usually eat whatever is on hand rather than choosing what we feel like eating or what we like. A. already has more of an eat-to-live mentality than I do, but I am coming to terms with how important food is to me– the ability to do my own grocery shopping, to choose what I eat and how to prepare it; to enjoy the food, and to eat healthily. Having my options limited and so many of my choices made for me is a source of stress. Part of the challenge set before me is to figure out what my limits are and to embrace those, but most of the challenge is to confront the deeper issues of my need for control. Having so little control over our schedule brings up the same feelings of stress.
          So, community life continues– we’re learning, and we’re experiencing the growing pains of adjusting to new rhythms and responsibilities.   It’s humbling to recognize our own flaws and limitations in the context of community, but we feel that we have been given a gift to be accepted into this family, and we look forward to the weeks ahead.