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"We are like Jacob wrestling with the angel until dawn, waiting to be blessed and limping away after the struggle.” -Daniel Migliore

  There are so many outrageous things that happen in our lives. You hear that your best friend has cancer. An innocent man has been executed. A child is suffering because of a cutback in Medicaid funding.

   Diana Gallaher (with me at left) about whom I wrote last week as an example of humility, is someone whose actions continue to teach. She is one who doesn't preach about compassion, she lives it.

   A few years back, concerned about hunger and poverty, she moved out of her comfortable lodgings to occupy low-cost housing. She endured southern summers without air conditioning and lived where safety, especially for women, is a constant issue.

   Simultaneously, she worked for a charity that sought better food for the poor. After that, she worked for an agency that pursued justice for Medicaid recipients. Now she helps the disabled.

   I often think about demonstrating. Diana does.

   Protests, of course, can be hazardous. In the course of demonstrating in favor of a state income tax (Tennessee has none) she was confronted by a vicious crowd of counter protesters.

   One opponent stood directly on her feet to block her. Another blared a horn in her ear so loudly it caused her hearing problems.

   As a peaceful demonstrator how do you engage the face of violence? Amid the noise, Diana opened her sacred ears to the voice of Love.

   "The woman standing on my feet is more than her angry face," she told herself. "The man before me is more than his blaring horn."

   She talked with the horn blower. "I heard his real pain," she wrote me. "He was a plumber who hated taxes because he could not make ends meet.  I remember the pain in his voice, not the pain experienced from his ear-piercing horn.  I am thankful that I don't think of him first as the man with the extremely annoying noisemaker."

   In the midst of fear Diana sought out the better angels of her enemy. She is "thankful" she found them. 

   Caregivers encounter troubled people every day. Sick people are often cranky. Family members, acting from fear, can become instruments of hate. Can we, like Diana, find compassion (rather than pity) for our "enemies?"

   I offer praise to Diana for her sacrifices. "I don't deserve it," she writes.

   But, as they "limp away from the struggle," the compassionate carry a sweet secret. Love provides Grace.

-Reverend Erie Chapman 

Photo Meditation: I made the image at left in New Orleans while exploring the impact of photographing my left hand inside a horn-like sculpture. (Copyright Erie Chapman 2011)