an excerpt from Chapter 4 ...

River of Kindness
I recall my first Darjeeling assignment. The jeep had gone as far as it could go on the narrow, muddy road that was saturated from heavy monsoon rains. A 25-kilogram bag of grain was loaded onto my back, and I was dispatched to complete the delivery on foot to a small bustee (village) 500 metres farther down in the valley. I was grateful the trekking was down, not up. It was an arduous trek, but there was a hungry village awaiting much-needed food supplies.

This experience had the taste of something very real – I sensed that I was participating in something bigger than myself. It roused inside me a call to find my own true hero path. Of course, the ego is always around, and it was trying to steal some attention: if only everyone back home could see me now. But there was nobody watching me make my muddy trek, no one to applaud my achievement. The genuine heroes, in fact, were the village folk themselves, truly heroic in the way they carried their poverty and their suffering. I could only humbly accept their expressions of gratitude. I felt my heart stir thinking of the song lyrics of “Guantanamera”: with the poor of the earth, I want to share my fate.

At that particular time in my life, aged 26, I was awakening to the vital realization that my life could make a difference to others. This insight was, in part, the result of finding myself in circumstances that called forth a response to human suffering. It grew also from encountering certain individuals who possessed exemplary hero qualities. India gave me exposure to both. Over time I have come to believe that the heroic abides inside each of us, within our very nature. However, we often resist our heroism. Its actualization sets forth a demanding task of recognition and response.

Not long after my initiatory experience, I met Sister Ivana at Jesu Ashram, a home for the destitute and dying at the base of the Himalayan foothills. Day after day, Ivana addressed the suffering of lepers, the sick, and the squatters who lived alongside India’s railway tracks. I had a sort of mad love for this servant of the poor, what I would call a spiritual infatuation. A few months later I had the opportunity to become her apprentice. I was assigned a bicycle and a bandage box, given instructions on worm treatment, and sent into the suffering throng. “I can’t do this. I am totally inept,” I argued. Sister Ivana responded with the words “Stephen, they simply need the medicine of kindness.”

I could only marvel as I watched Sister Ivana dole out her sweet compassion. Gratuitously, she came into my life to guide me onto the river of kindness. In every encounter, she bestowed dignity on the poor. Ivana did not discount the need for medical competence, but knew how integral care is to cure. The lepers received as much love from her as food rations, and the widows as much healing as help in building small thatched huts. Twenty-two years later I returned to Jesu Ashram to find Sister Ivana still devoted to doing her rounds (in her old age, with a motorized rickshaw), a tireless broker of gentle mercy to suffering humanity.

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