My Father's Archives #13

A few thoughts on the effects walls have on the people inside the wall (sadly, it has to do with the picture above).
First of all, walls not only shut out; they also shut in. Interaction and exchange with people outside the walls are affected. The suffering of those outside doesn't touch you anymore. It stops being part of your world. Your heart becomes desensibilized.
Second, walls make you think you're different from the ones outside. Normally, walls make you think you're better than them. Your heart becomes arrogant.
Third, when you think you are better than the rest, you also believe that you deserve better treatment, more privileges, a better life. Your heart becomes cruel.
Fourth, deprived of contact with those who suffer, your mind takes over. It creates ideologies and develops religions that justify your walls, your way of life. Your heart becomes ignorant and cold.


As I already described in one of my earlier blips, I was sent to a walled-in boarding school. We were English, North-American, German and Swiss kids with almost no contact with the native population. In church on Sundays, we were seated in the front rows while the Brazilians sat behind us. We didn't mix. During devotions at night before going to sleep, we were taught that the world was divided in good and bad people, in those that were saved and those that were lost. For a kid who grows up with walls around him that makes perfect sense.
I felt repulsed by those who were not like me. I didn't want to see their suffering because it was the fate of the lost, and I was saved.
The effects of this were immediate. After spending my first semester at the boarding school, I returned to the sertão to spend my holidays with my parents. I hardly left our house. The dry soil of the sertão, the very soil I had explored with joy and curiosity as a little child had become the land of the damned.
When your heart grows cold your mind will believe anything.


So what do you do when people start building physical, ideological and religious walls around you?

Love. Be generous with the beggar you see sitting in front of a department store; be lavish in your response to the tears of a neighbour, do more than your conscience asks you to do. Let the thief into your house when he comes unexpectedly in the middle of the night (1 Thessalonians 5:2). Love actively. 
It will make your heart glow again.