In search of the brother . . .

Anne Marie Visser

The day before yesterday I met the postman of our neighborhood and I asked him if he would have a long weekend because of Queens Day on Friday. He nodded and returned the question: "How about you?" When I told him that I had to go to the clinic Saturday morning he looked concerned and answered: "I can bring you to the hospital if you like!"

I was flabbergasted. Not because he is Turkish and a devout Muslim. Something I know since he started talking to me from September 11th. He was clearly afraid that we would identify him with those "bad Arab guys". In our anonymous living-quarter he is one of the few known in the many offices and hotels. Known and loved. But I was stunned because he offered me to help on his day off.

I would like to start with this little story because it shows two things:

• this man proves himself to be my neighbor and my brother, like those other friends, who support me during this period of illness. He was ready to be my helper...
• and secondly, we got to know each other - not because of his uniform - but because of the events. The threat of September 11th was not a declaration of war but was firstly a declaration of overt mutual suspicion. An event that threatened our society to think in black and white, in good and evil.

As a married man the postman surely doesn't understand my single life as a woman, as he won't understand my job as a woman-minister. And from my part I don't understand his family life and his background of first generation emigrant. But he proves to be my brother because he sees my possible need and he is willing to help. Those two factors play a role in ecumenism as well: the course of (the political) events and becoming aware of each other's needs (or gifts!).

***

Thinking about the direction in my own personal faith I come to realize that there are two other important themes:

First of all there is a deep longing to belong: to be part of a house and to share its stability. To share its tradition. To be part of a given place instead of having to fight and prove oneself into a family; or to invent one's place in life.

In these last months of personal crisis I have been dreaming about the house of my maternal grandparents. It has been a place to return to throughout my childhood. It was a house that sheltered my mother and I when we arrived in the motherland, the homeland after a stay in Indonesia for 3 years.

I can still remember the smell of clean starched sheets in the guestroom, the smell of the wooden roof on the attic and the camphor in the trunks we had taken along; and the smell of the oil-cooker in the kitchen where my grandmother made food simmer very slowly... so that the whole house was impregnated with juicy flavours (like this guesthouse sometimes smelled after the cherry-jam that must have simmered for hours).

Feeling at home and knowing oneself a part of a family-system seem to be-at first hand-things that we take for granted. But they are not! I had to outgrow a lot of inner resistance against settling down, before I could cherish the value of 'being home'.

Stability was unknown in our family for generations involved in trade inland and overseas. And it is very surprising that I came to cherish the Benedictine value of stabilitas. To love a particular place and its setting. To find a resting place in this life. It is a feeling that I get when I visit the cemetery of the monks and sisters here outside the wall.

Secondly there was a real fight to learn to be willing to search the brother and the sister. And not leaving them aside.

Brother- and sisterhood are always intentional. That may sound like a paradox, as brothers and sisters seem to be a given fact in our lives. But not for an only child. As I am of my mother. Never a lonely child for I was from the beginning taken care of by a babu with some other children of colleagues who worked in the hospital. I guess I was never alone, as children in the tropics are never left alone: they have bells around their ankles and everybody hears you disappear or approach.

Once in Holland I lived for 7 years with a foster-family who had 3 boys and a girl. I had to learn to adapt myself to a family, knowing that in ultimate moments I was no part of the family.

And only 15 years ago I found out that I had a half-brother and -sister from the first marriage of my father, whom I have never known. And it is a very emotional fact for all three of us that my unknown father probably is the transmitter of the cancer we all three suffer from as adults now. We seem to be part of the same 'conspiracy'.

***

This could be my life in a nutshell until now. But it is not enough. I didn't give you the ecumenical ingredients of it.

You will not be surprised that for me ecumenism is linked up with this story of finding the way back home, as it is linked with the longing for the lost brethren. Maybe as a Protestant, maybe as a contemplative, I cherish the lonesome conversation with God. As I am very keen on my individual conscience and convictions (which are not the same!).

When I was young I tried to keep God out of human affairs. People made a mess of history and didn't show them as trustworthy: that was my early vision of man. As it was the vision of my grandfather who had been in another war at the beginning of his century.

My vision of God was ambiguous: God the Father, who I longed to trust was yet the Father (like the Mother) that I was very much afraid to loose again, or never to find.

Very slowly I realized in life-through aging-that His will is the meaning of my being, that my life is meant to be, and yet He wants me to discover it while I am on my own feet. He is again and again asking my consent. Nothing is arranged behind my back.

That doesn't mean that He is always at my disposal: He is present, He is absent. And sometimes I am mistaken between the two. I can long for his presence as if I was still a child and yet His absence can turn into an unknown communion with Him and confidence in Him. His absence gives me space and time to get rid of the risk of taking things and people for granted. And even taking Him for granted. That is why the discussion about presentia realis is really very tricky.

***

This is the first step and the last: to stand on my own feet and walk in His sight.... and getting to solutions while walking with no safeguard in advance. There is always a risk.

Confidence and risk do not exclude each other. God's plan for me-unknown as it sometimes can be-is the basic trust of my celibate life. But the challenging part remains the place of the brother and sister in my life: not only my biological sister and brother, but the brother and sister in Christ.

The first letter of John the evangelist reminds us:

'those who say 'I love God' and hate their brothers and sisters, are liars;
for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The commandment [mizvot] we have from him is this: those who love God
must love their brothers and sisters also [1 John 4.20-21]

The Rule of S. Benedict is focused on this learning to live as brothers and sisters together as some kind of 'permanent education'. A learning process to convert to the lost brother. And the outcome is open. Reconciliation is a moment only given by God.

But this commandment to reconcile (forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespassed against us...) is not to be romanticized! The story of the return of Jacob to his brother (his fight with the angel); the return of the brethren of Joseph after their father's death-or even the return of the Prodigal Son are not only heart moving stories.

They are stories of getting back to an order that was denied, getting lost for whatever motive. And motives got very often hidden in the past. They are stories about a new chance to do justice after generations of misunderstandings and prejudices. Stories about the proper moment of reconciliation, and the courage to reconcile on the base of hidden love.

And reconciling presupposes that we can stand on our own feet, that we are capable of making our own decisions. That we have the courage to take the initiative. The decision to behave as a trustworthy sister or brother and to take into consideration what the ages past, what events (that have been unknown to us) have done with us or what we have spoiled ourselves voluntarily. Repeating our lack of basic trust from childhood.

We can spend a lot of time-emotionally and intellectually-on the legal aspects of the right to belong to a house, the right to belong to a family but at last we find out that we don't have to prove anything in theory. The only thing we can do is to be an expression of how God has justified us, in word and in deed: He not only calls us, but He keeps on guiding us. And He rarely rushes ....

Self-righteousness, trying to justify ourselves is something to beware of in finding back the brother.

***

God can have mysterious ways to bring the brother back in our life through our life-events.

I am pretty sure that my longing and jealousy for the Catholic brothers and sisters dates from the days of the house of my grandparents that lodged a Roman Catholic family which lost its own house during an air-raid bombing by the British in The Hague during World War II.

Those two distinct families shared for a while their family history. And gave each other mutual trust. They respected each other's way of life and convictions. And they never tried to convince each other. My grandmother once asked in secret if she could be taken to the parish church, for she was attracted by the mystery of it.

Years later, some twenty odd years, we visited as students the Benedictine monastery of Chevetogne with its orthodox liturgy. I was struck by the reality of the shining black tiles in the church. Tiles that seem to absorp my thoughts. Tiles that made me think of Javanese homes. I saw them in the moment of rest after the homily about Galatians 5: 'libere en liberte'.

It was in the roaring sixties and the sermon spoke of the utter autonomy of God the Father who could only guarantee our own liberation. It showed me my lack of trust to give authority to a God who cares, a God who is concerned and yet a judge above it all, above us all.

He was apparently no part of my social science and so I got the confidence to make a new decision in my life: to break off with the illusion that our society is the handiwork of man.

It was a kind of conversion experience. And the way that followed was the way back to the brother, because there was space again. Space for things to happen instead of being invented or manipulated by men.

After all I owe it to the careful guidance of a Benedictine brother that I didn't convert to Catholicism but found the way back to my own free-church tradition. And now-after another twenty years-I still need the confrontation with brothers and sisters to become aware of my own role in this life.

Obedience to one's own task-if it is God-given-can never exclude the brother, no matter is he is my friend or enemy. The moments of utter reconciliation lie in His hands: so if I can lose the brother (or the father) humanly speaking, I can always find him back in God's time, his kairos.

We are His handiwork-as oikomene (the whole living world) is of His making. We can only open our eyes and heart for it.

May 2nd 2004