Fr. John thinks about an experience he had in Sierra Leone and ponders if this could be a model for a "New World Order," where community means people, not states. (from Mission: The Xaverian Way).

e came in. I had seen him before. He had come to ask for some help to return to Kenema, his hometown in the far East of Sierra Leone, where his mother was living. He wanted to see if there was still danger from the rebels and, if it was the case, to carry her to Freetown. And this he did. Now he was living with her in the camp, within my Parish in Freetown.

He was a lovely man, well built, on the full flush of his adulthood, educated but extremely shy, perhaps from the humiliation of living in the utter misery of the camp. This morning he spoke of a woman who had just arrived in the camp. She was coming from the North, from the “Temne” tribe. Nobody knew her and she knew nobody. Pregnant, yesterday evening she had delivered a lovely baby, but, exhausted and sick, the poor woman had died during the night, unattended. She had rosary beads around her neck: was she a Christian? He was asking me to go for the funeral. It had been arranged from three o’ clock in the afternoon.

“Everything would have been ready”, he said… but…

After a few years in Sierra Leone you learn quickly to wait for that “but… ” that normally will reveal the deeper misery or the most impellent need or the heaviest stumbling block. “But the Baby…” he said hesitatingly. “Yes, what about the baby?” I asked. “Nobody wants it”, he said.

Yes, the baby! How to love and cherish one who is not of your blood, who is of another tribe, who comes from far away, the child of a woman who nobody knows and in a camp where all live just for the day! How tragic that, like mother sheep that recognize their own lambs by the odor they have, we too need the odor of our own skin and blood to accept another!

It is said that when Francis of Assisi tasted the pus and the lacerated skin of the leper he discovered the perfume that all humanity carries and began to recognize all human beings as his own.

I thanked him and I promised I would be there by three o’clock. And there I was, with a large crowd. On the distant horizon I could see the great ocean. In front of me instead, the greatest misery that the our world can produce: a coffin with “the well of life”, as the African calls a mother, inside, now for ever dry and locked up in its four wooden walls. And the eyes, the eyes of all were staring at death, something so common in those surroundings, but, at the same time, so foreign, so distant, so incomprehensible, so strange.

Is the world at last waking up from centuries of colonialism and self-interest?

By the strength of our common endeavor, we achieve more together than we can alone.

On one corner I saw a small girl carrying the baby. And there was I, a priest, in the most sacred Cathedral, chosen to celebrate life. I put on the stole over my white cassock and reverently stretched out my arms to the small girl who was quick to put the little bundle into my harms. How light was that bundle! I moved towards the coffin and I laid the baby on top of it. Then, I stepped back to see, to contemplate and to understand further.

The mother had planted the seed. There it was, moving above the stillness of its mother. The strange combination and unusual link between stillness and movement, new life and death, seemed to paralyze everybody and everything. There was something else that could not be defined but that appeared extremely attractive: LOVE!

It was the remembrance of a Love that now continued to be real and rendered still more gentle by the fragility of its source and its stillness.

Then a lament, a groaning, began to form. It grew out of my heart. And the lament became words “My people, I hear the cry of the mother!” The words became vision: the poor mother, who in so much pain had delivered the baby, now was there offering her treasure to all of us to be received and cared for. The little child was moving on the top of the coffin and child and coffin now had become voice and prayer and request. Oh, how could we resist?

“Oh my God, move the heart of a woman here to share the gifts she has received from You, a Gift to be shared with this mother”, I said with all my heart.
From the crowd a woman came out, went close to the coffin, took the little bundle with her motherly hands, pressed it to her breast and in silence returned to the crowd. The words “who was neighbor to the one who had fallen into the hands of the brigands?” had become flesh another time in this poor world of ours. Once again, we have understood that we are asked to take charge of one another!

We might wonder if this miracle may be happening on a wider sphere in the world today. Is the world at long last waking up from the long centuries of colonialism and self-interest? The British Prime Minister recently said: “The state of Africa is a scar in the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. But if we don’t , it will become deeper and angrier. By the strength of our common endeavor we achieve more together than we can alone. For those people who lost their lives on Sep. 11th and those that mourn them, now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial.”

And to this great number, and to this great suffering, allow me to add my poor little woman in that coffin who, with them all, cries out for a new world, a community of peoples that is no longer a “community of states”, in which each, with pure eyes and beautiful heart, can contemplate the little bundle as a symbol of a new order, of a new world.

Oh, let’s keep the coffin and bundle together. In this way we shall see also the real face of God !

— FR. JOHN ZAMPESE, SIERRA LEONE —