Dignity for the afflicted person
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
He is the homeless, the displaced, the refugee, the miserable, the unemployed, the marginalized, the abandoned, and the rejected.
He came to the wrong place at the wrong time.
He is the one who life retained its gifts from him and threw him into poverty until he became lost in the labyrinths of life.
Life is a fragile, meager structure, which in moments may turn into rubble... In a blink of an eye a person's life may turn into ashes.
The last glaring example before us is the night of the earthquake of the land north of Antiochian Levant, from Marash to Midyat, to Antioch, to Jableh, to Latakia, and to Aleppo. On that night, the lives of safe people turned into hell, and whoever had a roof to shelter him, had the sky as a roof, and whoever had a source of livelihood that avoided destitution, was waiting for his turn to get some of his food.
This model is the closest to our suffering and our memory, but if we go back to the past, we remember what happened in Palestine, the Nakba, and how its people were displaced from their land in their land, and how the Lebanese were displaced and led to destitution and poverty, and how Iraqi and the Syrian were destroyed on the heads of their safe people. All our people in the Levant will live homelessness and catastrophe.
After the Nakba of Palestine, the Levant turned, within three decades, into a nation of camps, which you see as you go and wherever you go, from Gaza to Mesopotamia, passing through all the land of milk and honey, the land of wine and leaven.
We live daily the tragedy of the afflicted person until it has become a natural part of our daily scene.
You find him in the camps of misery, in the neighborhoods of asylum, in the belts of misery, the slums, and around the cities where the luxurious life deafens the ears to the screams and pains of the miserable.
The wretched of the earth are the same, they carry the curse of behalf of the others, a curse whose source or origin we do not know if we consider it coming from beyond. Conversely, we know exactly how it came about if we apply the rules of econometrics, statistics, and models of wealth distribution that some classes prefer not to tackle.
Because of his misery, the arrogant think that they can insult his dignity, as they see his need in his face, in his clothes, and in his behavior and reactions.
We cannot deny that his poverty has made him a weak, defenseless person, who often practices tolerance in the face of bullying, but we do not know how much attacks to his dignity and feelings digs into his soul and how painful these actions are.
My humanity and my Christianity are ashamed of your poverty, O afflicted human being, and if I approach you to provide help, I do it with shame because of your neediness, O needy one. I am ashamed because life gave me and deprived you, I am ashamed because I am full and you are hungry, I am ashamed because I am dressed while you are naked, I am ashamed because I am warm while you are cold, and I am ashamed because I am healthy while you are sick.
If I approach you to lighten some of your heavy burdens, I will ask your permission because you are the one who gives me. You give me the beauty of giving and the warmth of sacrifice. It is my duty to thank you for allowing such feelings to invade my soul, to dwell into my very being, and to give me some satisfaction, my satisfaction with myself and the satisfaction of the Creator over me.
With this logic, we work in the Middle East Council of Churches, and we follow these values.
Our daily prayer, which I repeat in front of my colleagues, and which accompanies us in our diaries is: “The Lord has placed in our hands many resources – or talents – including reason, health, money, and decision-making power, may He enable us to use them well for the benefit of His servants, our brothers in humanity. This is our motto, and it is Equivalent to the Islamic saying, "As for the orphan, do not oppress, and as for the beggar, do not rebuke, and as for the grace of your Lord, speak."
How much joy and pride overwhelmed me when a person, who got help from our working team, called me and told me that our team called him and told him, "We have a gift for you, or a gesture towards you", and how much I felt that this needy person felt the dignity of using these words, simple in appearance and deep in content.
This is our culture in the ecumenical institution that brings us together, the MECC, and this is our custom. We give to the needy with dignity, and we are certain that dignity is the most important entity he possesses and the most precious thing time has left for him after his debacle.
"Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest." (Matt. 11:28) The incarnate Lord said it two millennia ago, and we abide by this saying. We, by our work, its content, and the way we perform it, relieve the heavy-laden from the burden of want and the fear of humiliation.
In our history in relief and social service, as in development, as in other fields, since the programs of service to the afflicted in Palestine, to the afflicted in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Iraq, we envelop our services with dignity, and we present them full of love to our “family”, our people and our brothers in humanity.
This approach is the cornerstone of our institutional culture, as we are on the verge of our fifty-year jubilee, and we do not intend to change that for the next fifty years. Rather, we will be more rooted in our work on human dignity, and this seminar tonight is part of this work, along with our other programs that depend on dignity Humanity as the compass of their work.
As I congratulate my colleagues for what they are doing, and praise their achievements and methods of performance, I say to them, "You remain the blatant model and the resounding horn of human dignity in this nation"!