A man is on a boat. He is not alone, but acts as if he were.
One night, without warning, he suddenly begins to cut a hole under his seat.
The other people on the boat shout and shriek at him: “What on earth are you doing? Have you gone mad? Do you want to sink us all? Are you trying to destroy us?”
Calmly, the man answers: “I don’t understand what you want. What I’m doing is none of your business. I paid my way. I’m not cutting under your seat. Leave me alone!”
What the fanatic (and the egotist) will not accept, but what you and I cannot forget, is that all of us are in the same boat.
By Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate
My Commentary:
The man cutting a hole beneath his own seat says, “It’s none of your business.” But on a boat, there is no such thing as your hole and my water. Eventually, everyone gets wet.
That little story contains a profound truth: our lives are all connected.
From the beginning of Scripture, God asks Cain, “Where is your brother?”Cain responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The entire Gospel answers: Yes!
Jesus makes the same point in the Good Samaritan Parable. The wounded stranger by the roadside becomes the Samaritan’s responsibility simply because he is suffering and another human being, a Samaritan, can help.
Pope Francis called our failure to recognize this responsibility the “globalization of indifference.” At Lampedusa in 2013, he warned that we can become so accustomed to another person’s suffering that we tell ourselves, “It doesn’t concern me.”
But the Holy Spirit will not allow us to live that way.
Poverty affects us. War affects us. Loneliness affects us. Racism affects us. Hunger affects us. The suffering of immigrants and refugees affects us. What happens to our environment affects us.
Not every problem has a simple solution, and we may disagree about solutions. But we cannot say, “It is none of my business.”
St. Paul wrote, “If one member suffers, all suffer together.”
We are passengers, but we are also caretakers.
We all belong to God.
And therefore, we belong to one another.
There is only one boat.
When was the last time YOU thought or said: “This doesn’t concern me.”
SOMETIMES YOU MUST STAND STILL IN ORDER TO GET MOVING TO WHERE GOD WANTS YOU TO GO!
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