The other day, shortly after Mother Teresa died, I watched what I think was an NHK documentary about the religious order she led and its work. The people gathered in that order had each come there for different reasons, and their backgrounds were immensely varied. Even so, as I watched them, I felt: “Ah, they are a family.”
They are, of course, a Christian group, but those whom they seek to help are not limited to Christians. Whatever a person’s religion, they recognize that person’s difference and regard them as someone to be helped. In a sense, their work can be called salvation that goes beyond the “exclusion of difference” found in secular religion.
I feel that this is why I was able to see “family” in them.
At heart, every person is an individual. We cannot fully understand even ourselves, much less fully understand others. Much unjust discrimination arises from refusing to recognize this “difference” and judging others by one’s own particular values—values that one mistakenly regards as universal. This often leads to treating “others” harshly and refusing to acknowledge their values. It is especially evident in colonial and racist policies, but I think such a tendency can be found, to a greater or lesser degree, in everyone. We are all hard on other people.
Although this basic structure does not change, it takes on a somewhat different form among blood relatives. This is because, as a family, there is an unconscious, tradition-supported forgiveness: in the end, one must forgive most things.
The reason Mother Teresa’s order appeared to me as one family may lie here. That is, they were in a relationship in which they could forgive one another. This was conscious forgiveness, grounded in an understanding of one another’s differences. In other words, the essence of family is “forgiveness,” and in that sense I intuitively felt that the order was a higher form of family, founded on “reason.”
Even without blood ties, and even with different backgrounds, people can become a family if they have a spirit of forgiveness. This is true at school and in society at large. And only when the world becomes one family will a society without war or hunger arrive.
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