By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Story one.
We were children, maybe some twelve, thirteen years old; people from the street. He invited us to come to him, because his mother made baklava (*a layered pastry dessert made of filo pastry, filled with chopped nuts, and sweetened with syrup or honey) and tulumba for all of us.
I swear I didn’t know what day it was and what the cakes were for: that’s what the time was like. And I was a good kid of my time.
It was Eid and he was not happy. Before we left, he burst into tears. Since we were already fed, since none of the children received sympathy and understanding, we, of course, then went and told him that we would play with a ball, so he could come as soon as he stopped whining.
In the evening, my mother asked me: I hear you were at Samir’s? –
-Yes, why are you asking?
– What does he say, how’s his mom?
That’s how I found out why my friend cried: because that day, on Eid, his mother went for cancer surgery. She survived; in any case, she lived until the war, after which I don’t know what happened to my friend, his punk sister and mother who raised them without a father who no one had ever heard of.
It took many years before I understood the thing that I am telling you about now.
I’m telling you about a woman who, even though she lay down on the operating table that day, from which she could have gone to the grave, tidied up the house to be as clean as a pharmacy, prepared cakes and taught her son to invite friends. She did this because she believed that there is order in the world, and that order is to be respected even if you go to surgery that day. She did so because that is what mothers do: her child will celebrate Eid as befits, even if it means that she will prepare cakes until late the night before the operation.
It was love. Her love for the child also touched us, his friends, because we entered the gravitational field of that love. It is a completely different story that I neither noticed nor understood that love that day. That’s how it is: we pass by love without looking back, like next to a dilapidated couch thrown out on the street that no one needs anymore; we reject love, in the name of desire, pride, or fear, whatever; and then we complain that there is not enough love in the world.
Story two.
They took off my cast and my mother screamed. My leg was wrongly healed. Don’t panic, the doctor told her and suggested that we go to Mejra in Kotorac. My mother had confidence in modern medicine; that’s why, when I broke my leg, she took me to the Kosevo hospital so that the doctors could fix it for me. Modern medicine, on the other hand, had confidence in the Majra.
She, Mejra, received us in the evening. She told me to sit on the couch. She told my mother that she had fixed football players’ legs; she used to fix bones for anyone who needed help, but now she does it less and less because she has heart problems. Then she exchanged a few trivial sentences with my mother, something I can’t remember, and then, when you write about it decades later, you have to make up lines. She spoke until she was sure she had drawn my attention. Then, in two quick movements, with a force that even today I cannot connect with her tiny body, she broke my leg and adjusted it properly.
Here, rub his leg with this – she told my mother and put comfrey ointment into her hands.
She didn’t want any money. Before we left, she brought us cakes: take some, it’s Eid, she said. Then my mother cried.
I’ll die of shame, she told me when we left.
Today is Eid and newspapers and portals are full of messages calling for religious tolerance.
What tolerance?
Who am I to tolerate, what do I have to tolerate? To tolerate a woman to whom I broke into the house on the most important day of her life, asking for help, and thus interrupted her celebration? To tolerate a woman thanks to whose goodness I am not disabled today?
Tolerance is bad. Tolerance is the opposite of love. Because tolerance is indifference, and the true opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference. What we tolerate is negatively determined in advance. Have you ever heard that someone tolerates winning the lottery of one million euros or tolerating the fact that he got an apartment from the company? Happiness and good things are not tolerated.
No: you tolerate what bothers you and what you don’t want, but you are civilized enough to suppress your first impulse – to eliminate what bothers you.
After all, if you are a Christian, you are not called to tolerate, but to love. How – what do I mean?
The answer is in the Gospel of Luke, in the story of the good Samaritan. Jesus reminds the disciples of the Law.
Who says: Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.
The disciples ask: And who is my neighbor? Who to love?
In response, Jesus told them about a man, a Jew, who was beaten by bandits and who was dying by the roadside. Two men passed by him and did not help him. Which two refuse to help a man in need? “His”: the priest and the Levite. Then a Samaritan, a member of a group with whom the Jews were at loggerheads, came and saved him.
Jesus then asks: Which of the three was closest to the one caught by brigands?
Disciple: The one who took pity on him.
If the story ended here, the solution would be painfully simple: the key requirement of Christianity, to love one’s neighbor, would actually be to love the one who is kind to me. We find this reduction in religious fanatics: they keep love only for those who are within their community, for those who, bound by blood, culture and faith, hold on to both good and evil. If that were really the case, it would mean: love the same person as you are. But it is not so.
Instead, Jesus finally says: Go, and you do the same thing. So, act like a Samaritan, do, if you do good, like the one with whom you are in conflict, in hatred, do good to strangers, to the Other, to those who are not “yours”. Jesus, therefore, answers the disciples’ question: Who is our neighbor? With a question: To be a Christian means to be hysterical, and as a hysteric to know that the Other will always remain traumatic for me, that it will make me hysteric, and yet have the obligation to do good to the one, when we are hated, when we defeat and humiliate ourselves, we beastly aim at.
Tolerance of Otherness is a lie that fails to hide its own emptiness: the gaping lack of love within us.
There is no Other; we are all one.
God is one, the world is one, the struggle is one.
” For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12).
