We are here to serve others. That
includes the more glamorous sides of service: having discussion, serving food,
being involved in developing new ideas. But it also includes the less attractive
jobs which are often not seen. Cleaning the rooms of departing guests is an
interesting experience. Most of us as able-bodied adults clean our own homes. So cleaning a bathroom which has been used by a complete stranger
can feel like an intrusive act, an invasion of personal privacy.
At the very core of peace and
reconciliation work is the belief that all people are equal. We are all equally
valuable. It is very easy to hold this belief as an intellectual idea but not
really believe it in relation to how we live. We can all too quickly fool
ourselves into thinking that we are too good for certain kinds of work, subtly believing
that we are in some way superior or of greater value than other people. These
feelings of being of unequal value can all too quickly lead us into conflict
because when they are challenged we react.
If we aspire to believe in
equality as an important building block towards peacemaking then we have to
make concrete decisions to affirm this equality. What we believe is testified to,
not by our words, but by our actions. Ideas are not enough; it is our actions
which count. So we need to practically remind and re-remind ourselves that we
are all of equal value. This means that everyone (especially those in
leadership positions) has to do the work considered the lowest in status, in
our cultural context this means that everyone has to clean!
Gandhi was a strong advocate of
this kind of practical equality; he famously insisted that absolutely everyone,
including himself, had to take turns in cleaning the toilets. No one is too important
to do the work of the least cultural value.
This sense of superiority and
inferiority is often engrained into our mentality. It is really fascinating to
observe how many of the guests react to you when you are cleaning. It is often
as if they have subconsciously made the assumption that being the person who is
cleaning automatically makes you inferior and them superior. One example of
this mindset is exemplified by how messy the rooms are often left, when leaving
a room many guests clearly haven’t given a moment’s thought to the person who
will have to clean that room.
So perhaps one of the ways in
which we are prophetic in the way we live here is to clean. And not just to
clean but to encourage others to clean alongside us. We are here to make people
feel welcome. At a superficial level to make a person feel welcome is to do
things for them, to allow them to feel superior.
But there is a deeper level of welcome which we can offer, we can challenge them to be our equals. Making someone feel at home can sometimes involve reminding them that when at home they have to clean their own bathroom.
But there is a deeper level of welcome which we can offer, we can challenge them to be our equals. Making someone feel at home can sometimes involve reminding them that when at home they have to clean their own bathroom.
