In God's Image!

After a seemingly endless stream of lectures at college in Coimbatore, India where I was getting trained to be a teacher, my classmate and I walked home under the relentless and sweltering glare of the Sun. As we walked we talked about things pertinent to our course and about generalities that occupy the imagination of twenty year olds. After a half hour walk I reached my room.

I was staying in the house of a school headmistress as a paying guest. And I sorely missed home and friends. Just in order to alleviate the misery of being by myself I was in the habit of busying myself during those long evening hours that almost always seemed to crawl at snail’s pace. I filled my evening with walking and reading lest my mind wandered to sad thoughts that one is wont to when alone or away from home. And on that given day, as soon as I came back from classes, as usual I sat on the wooden bench in the narrow kitchen and I pored over The Indian Express sipping a cup of over sweetened tea. Just as I finished reading the regional news and turned the page to world news I heard aunty (the headmistress in whose house I was staying as a paying guest) yell at a feverish pitch, “You must come and watch this.”

I quickly walked up the narrow flight of stairs to her room, where there already was quite an assemblage peering intently at the television screen. From the jigsaw puzzle of the newscaster’s commentary, aunty’s interjections and the noisy observation of the other folk there, I gathered the horrific picture of what had happened in America on the 11^th of September, 2001. We kept silently flitting in and out of the room; we couldn’t keep ourselves away from the heart wrenching scene of loss. In a strange sense it was our way of expressing solidarity with those who had lost everything.

Over the years I have often wondered, what is it about us humans that we can grieve for the suffering of another we have never even met; Without skipping a beat our hearts begin to feel the pain of someone half way across the globe. In the tragic unfolding of human grief, humanity reaches out to each other. In the last couple of days I have heard so may heroic narratives of men and women who gave their todays so that someone else might have their tomorrows. They looked the horrific scenes of grief in the eye and rose above it in reaching out to fellow human beings.

I can’t help but think that the capacity to share in the suffering of another is the divine spark in us. This to me is one of the irrefutable proofs that we were indeed made in the image of God. In feeling another’s pain, in our reaching out and in our giving up of ourselves for another we truly reflect the God in whose likeness we were created.