I remember being at a summer conference-- during an evening lecture.
It was raining buckets outside, and about fifty of us were doing serious business inside, talking about the war in Vietnam--agonizing over our impotence in the face of the horrors of that war.
Suddenly, a very wet, muddy young man burst into the rear of the hall.
"Help me, help me," he cried. He was driving too fast, had missed a turn and spun off the road in the dark, and was himself thrown out onto the road because he was not wearing his seat belt.
His pickup truck was hanging on the edge of a ravine. With his wife and child still in it, so scared they couldn't move. "Help me, help me."
As one body we rose and poured out of the hall, running into the rainy night behind the terrified young man. As one we grabbed onto the small truck and pulled it back from the edge, and as one we lifted the truck back onto the road and spun it around onto the shoulder for safety.
The mother and child were in shock, but otherwise uninjured.
Tenderly, they were carried back to the conference grounds to someone's room--dried off, wrapped in blankets, comforted. A doctor among us examined them. Warm tea was brewed. Mechanics in the group made sure the truck was in safe working order.
The young man admitted how foolish he had been, how sorry he was to have risked his life and the life of his family, and how deeply he felt our compassion. Within a couple of hours, the young man and his family were on the road again. He will never forget. Nor will those who helped.
This response to crisis--with strangers or friends or family--is part of our nature. Every day, every week, every year since time began, whatever the size or nature of the crisis, this has been true of the human community. A fact that must be laid alongside all we know of the horror of man's inhumanity to man. Few of us do not have a story to tell--of what we gave or what was given to us in response to "Help me, help me." We are capable of being agents of one another's revival. None of us can go all the way alone.
Even in the midst of the unbearable agonies of prisons and concentration camps, there are those who choose to help--to give to others: bread, shoes, comfort, whatever. These acts of compassion are the shining, diamond-tough confirmations of human dignity.
This is keeping our affairs in order at the highest level. This is communion in its highest form The ritual of the keeping of the living flame. Held daily in the unfinished cathedral of the human spirit.
Robert Fulghum, From Beginning to End
