The Story of Relationship
Our Capacity for Compassion
In his book Night, Elie Wiesel told a story of his childhood in a Nazi concentration camp. In his recalling, thousands of Jews who’d gone without food or water for 3 days, were driven out of their barracks before dawn into the thickly falling snow. They were herded into a field where they were forbidden to sit or even move much. There they would stand in a straight, still line, facing the back of the person in front of them, until evening when they’d be herded onto a train that would take them deeper into Germany. As they stood, the snow collected in a layer on their shoulders. When their thirst had finally become intolerable, one man suggested they eat the snow. But the guards wouldn’t allow them to bend over. So the person in front of this man agreed to allow him to eat the snow that had accumulated on the back of his shoulders. The act spread through the line until there in that field, they were no longer individuals suffering alone—they were a community acting together. They became the place of nourishment, of love, for each other.
These kinds of acts might take us by surprise, unexpected as they are in the midst of human suffering, or even in us living separate human lives. When I go to work with the youth group of my church, it doesn’t really surprise me any less that these youth members keep choosing to come together to talk about how we might love God and one another. In a world tugging at their seams with choices and decisions, I think in part they keep coming back because they’re discovering how it feels for relationship to grow, how it feels to expand and trust, and to learn to be love for one another. There’s no greater yes pulling at our seams than that. This is how we come to know the truth of what Kate Bowler says: “To be fully known in all our humanity is a God-sized project—but blessed are we living our human-sized lives in the company of each other.”
In our story of relationship, we discover that life is so beautiful, and life is so hard. And somehow, in this risk of being known by one another, we are made stronger for both the beautiful and the hard. The absurd faith we have in each other is somehow bolstering us up so we can continue to understand the kind of deep love that won’t let us look away from each other, won’t let us turn our backs, but keeps us deciding to be part of one another—no matter how risky it is.
