Magazine letter for August 2023
This is the month of the great British get-a-way. The children have broken up and the family holidays begin. Whether it is to accompany a long flight, or for something to do by the poolside – many of us will take a novel to accompany our travels. I love stories, I can’t get enough of them – short stories, long stories, stories with a moral, stories without a moral, stories on the radio, stories on television, stories in a book. I don’t think I’m alone, human beings just respond to stories, made-up sequences of events, made-up characters, pure invention or supposed reality, it doesn’t really much matter, we just like stories. It may be because we like to try life out. We can only live our own life, with all its limitations and challenges, joys and sorrows but we like to see how other lives turn out, when the circumstances are different. I suppose we like to put ourselves in a different place, asking ourselves the question what would I have done in that situation?
This ability to imagine different lives, or even our own life differently, is one of the things that defines our humanity. We can put ourselves in another person’s shoes – we can empathise. We see a great tragedy unfolding on the television, a missile attack in Ukraine, or an earthquake in Turkey, and we see people without shelter, without food, confused and frightened, and although we have never been in such a situation, most of us can imagine enough to feel compassion for them. This is perhaps where loving your neighbour as yourself begins, with that desire to reach out a hand and help.
But, of course, fellow feeling only goes so far. At some point action must follow the feeling. The feeling must be given shape and meaning with a response, and that can be challenging. When our compassion is awoken by people near at hand then action is clearly possible, and we are fortunate because there are now so many organisations that exist to lend a hand, from the basics banks to charity shops, from hospital visiting to knitting ‘fish and chip’ tops. Lending a hand can be immensely rewarding, giving a new dimension to one’s own life as we come into contact with other people.
There is a medical doctor in Guernsey, Dr Susan Wilson, who was working for a UN medical centre in Ruanda and noticed many hungry children outside the fences of the compound, she was told that they were unable to help them as they were from Tanzania and didn’t fall within the terms of their mandate. She resolved to return under her own mandate and do something for them. The organisation she started currently provides the means of education for 25,000 orphans – see https://www.tumainifund.org.uk/how-we-help. What just one woman with empathy can do.
William