encountering others
Beingness
who we are can instigate social transformation
S t e ph a n A . S c hw a r t z
M
y friend Sheila, who was a tough-minded New York career newspaperwoman turned magazine writer, prided herself on her cynical view on life and her ability to not be taken in. One day she got an assignment to do a story on Mother Teresa, and Sheila welcomed the opportunity. She saw the piece as an exposé. “I thought she was a fraud, a genius at public relations maybe; but I disliked her conservative theology, which I thought demeaned women, and I found her constant involvement with the rich and famous very suspect.” She explained to me how she arranged to join Mother Teresa and spend more than a week traveling with her and watching her at one of her hospices.
that I wasn’t coming back; that I wanted to give myself to Mother Teresa’s work. It left me confused and ecstatic. I could not resolve my thinking and my feelings.” No one else in modern history has understood and articulated the approach of beingness better than Mahatma Gandhi. Just before he was assassinated, a reporter had the opportunity to interview Gandhi and asked this question: “How did you force the British to leave India?” Britain had dominated the Indian subcontinent for more than a century. Gandhi had no army, no money to speak of, no official position, none of the trappings that normally confer authority and power.
life-affirming beingness is core to a social “ Positive transformation strategy based on nonviolence. ” “My first impression never changed,” she said. “I disagreed with almost everything she had to say about religion. I found her views about God depressing, and her vision about the place of women in the church almost medieval. At the same time from the very first moment I was in her presence, I had this overpowering urge to call the magazine and tell them
Yet he had made the most powerful nation of his day leave its most valuable colonial possession, without a war. Gandhi answered the question in this way. It perfectly articulates the power of beingness. “It was not what we did that mattered,” he told the reporter, “although that mattered.” [ continued on page 14 ]
LILIPOH
Winter 2016