Getting out of my car…

One of the joys of living in Cape Town, where I now work, is that on several weekends, I’ve been able to park my car at home and get around on the public transport system and wherever my two feet can take me.

It has allowed me to notice the details of my surroundings in a way that is impossible when you’re concentrating on not driving into the car in front of you, whose driver inexplicably slows suddenly to 30km/h in a 60 zone!

It has been a few years since I last was a pedestrian. Back then, I was a penniless student, and it must have shown from my battered backpack, my dishevelled appearance as I was normally chasing a bus, in my trademark battered jeans. This might have been the reason I was mostly left alone.

I guess I look different now. I am older, no longer look as if my clothes are in desperate need of an upgrade, and my routes clearly show that I am more a tourist than someone in a rush to get somewhere.

This means that I’m frequently harassed for money, for food, for help, and sometimes I have been the focus of someone who just needs to hurl abuse at the world as a way of expressing their frustrations at a society that mostly ignores the most marginalised.

This made me think. When we are driving around in our cars, we don’t have to engage with anyone. We turn up the radio and wind up our windows to shut out the beggars at the traffic lights. And then we zoom past everyone else.

Our cars are a means through which we can touch the world outside of our families and our workplaces, but often they become bubbles in which we isolate ourselves from coming into contact with the lepers of our modern society who make us uncomfortable.

Perhaps we are called to take ourselves out onto the streets and interact with the heart-breaking poverty that resides in our streets and to recognise our own poverty.

While I can buy a meal for a homeless guy, I can’t feed everyone, and there will always be someone who is disappointed that I couldn’t give them something, too. I can listen to a man who tells me that he is desperately trying to get home to his family in a neighbouring country but I know that my small donation won’t go anywhere near being enough to buy the ticket home. I also need to recognise my inability to control how any monetary help I may give will be used.

But I must also allow the poor to interact with me, allow them to enrich my life. Like the young homeless man who in thanks for a few small coins told me and two friends that we had beautiful smiles.

Who needed this moment most? The homeless youngster who craved the dignity of a normal conversation with three women who live worlds away from his hand-to-mouth existence? Or three girls out on Valentine’s Day, knowing that he wasn’t just speaking about physical beauty but perhaps of something deeper which in today’s material world is so often forgotten?

Human contact. Allowing God-in-you to speak to God-in-me. This must always be the first goal of any form of communication. All of the latest technologies are only useful if they are able to enhance this goal and break down the barriers that prevent us from reaching out to one another.

Let me leave you with three short quotes from Pope Francis’ message for 2014 World Communications Day (observed by most of the Church on June 1 this year, but in our region on September 7), which expresses these ideas far more eloquently than I can:

Let our communication be a balm which relieves pain and a fine wine which gladdens hearts. May the light we bring to others not be the result of cosmetics or special effects, but rather of our being loving and merciful neighbours to those wounded and left on the side of the road.

Jesus shifts our understanding: it is not just about seeing the other as someone like myself, but of the ability to make myself like the other. Communication is really about realising that we are all human beings, children of God.

A culture of encounter demands that we be ready not only to give, but also to receive.