Human kindness

Here’s something the opponents of the Muslim prayer home on Erbsville Road should have considered.

In present-day Turkey, I once visited a chapel on a mountainside a little way from the ancient Greek city of Ephesus, well known among Christians for St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. The chapel incorporated a very old, small building that many believe is the home where the elderly Virgin Mary was taken by St. John to live out her last years. It’s now a popular tourist destination, as well as a pilgrimage site for Christians and Muslims alike.

There were many Western tourists in the building, busy looking around, chatting and snapping a lot of photos. Then an individual entered the chapel with a quite different purpose. It was an elderly Muslim imam, carrying a small, rolled-up rug under his arm. He looked around for a moment, then selected a quieter corner of

the room, spread out his rug and did something that no other visitor was doing. He prayed.

My wife has been teaching English to Syrian refugees. One woman, a Muslim, recently told her that she wanted to go to a church to light a candle. It took quite a few phone calls to find a church that was both open during the week and had real candles that could be lit. They went there. The woman lit her candle and stood alone for a long while. Then she turned and said: “I was praying to Meryem and the Prophet Issa.” These are the names Muslims give to the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.

Paul suggested to the Ephesians that wisdom and revelation would come to them through “the eyes of your heart enlightened” (Ephesians 1.1.18, Revised Standard Version).

There’s no need for complicated heart surgery to open the eyes of your heart and focus properly. As St. Paul also instructed the Ephesians, “be kind to one another.”

Trusting our innate, simple human kindness could have spared us from descending into such sorry rancour. Greg Michalenko Waterloo