Word Made Flesh

Photo: Hannah Harrod Casper

It was the beginning of my first day back at Prem Dan, Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute Poor in Kolkata, India. I’d been there in the beginning of 2005 while on my Servant Team and now found myself four months later visiting again for several weeks.

I tried to start a few conversations with other volunteers who had come from around the world to serve in this home but got no response. I noticed that there was a hierarchy in volunteering. Those who had been in Kolkata long enough to have friends among the patients or know the Missionaries of Charity sisters by name ran Prem Dan. They looked down on the short-termers like myself, folks who were only passing through for a few weeks or days. The volunteers had a sense of ownership about the jobs that they found for themselves in the homes. Passing out food, for example, is a position of honor. Once I saw 10 women standing around trying to pass out food, while one or two volunteers did the work, refusing to share the job with the other women.

In the lack of welcome from the other volunteers that first day, I met my own struggle to welcome new people into community with me. After they refused to share a job with me at Prem Dan, I recognized my own desire to feel that my work for God was significant — that I was significant. I think all the volunteers had come to Kolkata looking for a bit of the Divine in humanity, longing to see what Mother Teresa had seen that compelled her to live so fully among the poor. In our woundedness, we had brought with us to Kolkata all the things we had hoped to leave behind, especially our pride. The truth that we often let our identities get wrapped up in being needed by others was so clear to me that day. It was strange to find pride and politics even in a beautiful place like Prem Dan, but I kept seeing this pride in the volunteer community around me and, more uncomfortably, within myself.

Saddled with some of these thoughts, I sat by myself, pathetically eating a biscuit during a mid-morning break in the July Kolkata heat, totally regretting my choice to be in India. In the midst of that first day, I wondered how I was going to spend three more weeks by myself in a strange city.

The next morning and the next I forced myself to wake up and try again to enter where I felt unwelcome. As I walked to Prem Dan on the third day, someone quietly said, “Hi, my name is Esther.” Esther walked with me the entire trip to Prem Dan, and we continued to talk as we served side by side. That day she invited me into her favorite tasks, introducing me to her friends among the residents. Later we shared a meal with her roommate, Lisa. They told me about their arrival in Kolkata six weeks prior for a short trip with their Toronto church family. They told me about how they’d been broken by seeing the poverty of Kolkata and extended their tickets to stay the whole summer with another friend, Andrew. The next day, I packed my bags and moved to a cot in their tiny two-bed hostel room, where I slept underneath the clothesline they’d rigged between the beds to dry their hand-washed clothes.

During our days and nights together, I celebrated the humility of a Kolkata summer with my Canadian friends. As we talked, sweated, shared tasks at Prem Dan, ate ice cream with a group of med students from NYU and Indian food with a friend who lives on the street, they reflected the hospitality of Christ to me. These three were continually admitting their dispensability, challenging me to see where my own pride about being “needed” came between myself and my friends living at Prem Dan. The Canadians’ hospitality was an expression of their humility: recognizing their need for community and for the most vulnerable to know Jesus fully.

That summer I had to learn how expendable I am in order to know Jesus more fully. I had to learn that I am only a participant in the moving work of the Kingdom, the Kingdom that existed at Prem Dan before I arrived to volunteer and continues to exist long after I left Kolkata. I saw how Jesus gave Himself completely to us and retained no sense of achievement in living among the most vulnerable. He welcomed all to come and sit at His feet, whether they came for the entire three years of His ministry or just for an afternoon. His becoming the Word made flesh wasn’t about having the most important job.

As Christ gently reveals more of His perfect nature in comparison with my own humanity, I receive humility. I think this gift of humility is the natural response of gratitude from our hearts when we are faced with the magnanimous love of God. I can’t compete with the extravagant gift of God’s love, the way I might want to compete with other volunteers to be the most giving or the most liked by the residents. My participation in life and serving among the most vulnerable is only a small visible expression of God’s already-existing work there.

When I imagine a celebration of humility, I remember a humid, hot summer in Kolkata eating biscuits at Prem Dan, full of gratitude for the privilege of service among the most vulnerable.

Photo: Jara Sturdivant