Emmanuel

I've been thinking about some of the people we met on the streets of Kolkata.

Some of the young lads who would come up to us and play and do all those street handshakes, smile and chat then switch into the beggar just as we passed the snack shop. The lad who we got to know and took to KFC, who looked genuinely sad when I explained we were getting onto a minibus to go to the airport and back home, and who hung around for a good while to say goodbye and also ask for a few more rupees. I've been thinking about the rickshaw puller I used a couple of times, the second time only because he was so pleased to see me walking down the pavement intending to walk. I've been thinking about my attempt to show him respect with a hearty handshake and then when I passed him for the last time and said goodbye. I've been thinking how he simply seemed disappointed once he realised that my smile was one of goodbye and brought no promise of earning a few rupees more. I've been thinking of the old lady I gave a couple of bread rolls to. I think of the lad who spent an evening with the girls colouring-in on the door step of the "Y", being a kid for a short time up until his mother took him off to earn something. I wonder what impact we had on him. Does he remember that evening? Maybe it's slipped into his subconscious. I pray he at least remembers that it was the girls who were with the Christians in Rippon St who gave him some simple love. It was Jesus.

I wonder how close we came to making a relationship with any of these that extended beyond the rich benevolent westerner patting the head of the poor. When they saw us on the street did they smile to see someone who cared or someone who gave? I confess to being a little offended a couple of times when one of the lads would switch to the beggar, pull the pitiful face, and rub his stomach in the show he gave everyone.

Maybe I'm being naive to think a relationship could form beyond that of rich-man beggar-man. There was a week or so when I forgot I had a white face, I forgot I looked like a visitor. I started to remember when all the European backpackers arrived. I recall the sudden realisation walking down Park Street heading for the Metro and the Anandaloy home that I looked as out of place as these pale wealthy space invaders. Perhaps that's why I resented them being there.

But how on earth could I expect to form any kind of real friendship with these people whose lives are lived in the equivalent of my wheelie bin? At the end of the day I went back to a bed in a spacious room in the "Y". In the end I flew back to a land dripping with money. My trip to Kolkata airport alone could well be further than some of those kids have ever travelled. Back in the UK on my walk home that Friday I could almost see the currency just spilling out of the mortar and down the walls of the regular British houses I was passing. I recall seeing some family on the Downs just walking along with a pushchair or playing football on the Bank Holiday Monday and suddenly such leisure time felt like yet another rich man's luxury. I can't exaggerate the difference between our lives. The universe is infinite demographically speaking.

I'm still working through the "City of Joy". It's an easy read but I spend little time reading it. A Catholic priest settles into a Kolkata slum, lives how they live, eats what they eat, suffers as they suffer. It's just a story and I don't know how it turns out yet! But I guess that's what it would take. If one wants to step beyond a simple charitable relationship to show a deeper love for someone you need to sit along side them wherever that is. In other places I've defined love as "giving yourself to someone", and there's a sense in which material giving gets in the way, is a distraction. Greatest thing I can give is time, my attention, myself. Then, afterwards, the gift is more.

So my role-model is God who became man. He came to save and so doing enable a genuine relationship with us. A genuine relationship, not one where we just look up to heaven pitifully and rub our belly, but one where our joy is in the giver not the gift. Emmanuel, God with us. Jesus Christ who though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, so that we by his poverty might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). God is love, love par excellence, and knows how to do it like no one else.

Whether in Bristol or Kolkata that's the standard he's set.

Only remaining question is do I have the guts to follow his example?