The slow growling snort of an exasperated sigh hissed behind me. “They need to open more registers”, the short-grey-haired hisser harrumphed. She clutched her four items and turned to the man behind her. “Why don’t they open more registers?” He shrugged. She turned back to me.
“I could have stopped at the one in Leesburg”. She informed everyone within earshot. “They told me to stop for my knitting things on the way home. The one in Leesburg is a few miles out of my way, but it wouldn’t have taken this long.” She sighed again loudly. She’d been waiting approximately four minutes.
Over the next ten minutes, she proceeded to get out of line three times to check the length of other lines, give a minute-by-minute play-by-play for the line immediately next to ours (which, she mentioned four times, was faster than ours and she should have gotten in it when she had first thought of it), and complain about the magazines in the check-out stands. The Weight Watchers magazine wasn’t current and the Food Network special issue on Chocolate was just plain annoying. She’d given up chocolate for Lent.
When I (and the man in front of me) encouraged her to take her crochet hooks and, please, go ahead of us, a shocked little girl look crossed her face. She peered innocently through her glasses and her free hand fluttered to her heart. “I could have waited!” Clearly.
When my turn at the register finally arrived, a slow smile crossed the check out girl’s face. “Kerosene!” she exclaimed, zapping the bar code with her hand-help scanner and laughing a private little chuckle. “When I was a little girl I would sell it.” She shook her head and continued to coax a steady beep from the item-fed scanner.
“Kerosena” She sang in a sing-songy voice, the past all swirled up about her eyes. “We would get in line at 4:00 in the morning to wait and wait just to buy some, then sell it in the afternoon.” A patient beauty clung to her, a gentle peace rose and fell with the rhythm of her hands. “It paid for my lunch at school, and pencils and things.” She smiled, as if the chore had been more a pleasure than a pain.
“Where are you from?” I asked gently, always curious about international flavors that might spice up my otherwise “normal” days.
“Sierra Leone” she answered, smiling and nodding, lost in days gone by. “Is that everything for you, then?”
It was. It was quite enough, actually, when I thought about how she must have lived through (or at least known and loved some who had lived through) the brutal eleven year civil war that swept through Sierra Leone a decade or so ago. In its wake, 50,000 people lay dead and more than two million were displaced as refugees. I wondered if she were one of them.
I wondered, too, if the woman with crochet hooks and precious little time to stand in line had any idea how short (comparatively) the line actually was. Or how fortunate she was to stand in it, separated as she was from famine and civil war, government brutality and permanent displacement. Granted, I had no idea the possible personal hells the knitting woman may have experienced or have been experiencing, but it seemed that being driven from one’s home reeked of a little more devastation than being driven to shorter lines in Leesburg. Somehow, it all just didn’t feel fair.
But, what is fair? Where does our desire for fairness, freedom and equality even come from? Many cultures have vastly different histories, religions, values and priorities, but somehow hold similar convictions: murder, theft, and intentional abuse of innocents are always taboo. Cowardice and selfishness are never praised. Most civilizations develop systems for judging between two opposing moral views (courts, etc.), but what gives anyone or any system the right to declare one particular behavior ‘right‘ and its opposite behavior ‘wrong’?
Having spent over two years working with refugees, listening to their stories and settling them in new homes while they mourned the loss of homes destroyed and gone, I heard more accounts of pain and sorrow than I ever wanted to. Stories about camps in Sierra Leone surfaced, stories of entire refugee camps made up of amputees. Rebel leaders had a tradition – when they captured a village, anyone who refused to join them was forced to choose from a hat a folded slip of paper, on which was written either “short sleeves”, or “long sleeves”. If they drew “short sleeves”, either one or both hands were chopped off. If “long sleeves”, then one or both arms.
The painful truth is that if we are not intrinsically valuable, we have no right to condemn such behavior. If our rights, as humans, are not equal or fundamental, if they are dependent instead on our status, our looks, our positions of power or wealth, then an entire community forced to function with fewer limbs than the rest of humanity should not shock us. Three hundred amputees, the youngest of which a three-year-old girl, have no right to stir in us feelings of anger or compassion. But, would we feel human if they did not?
The world is a broken place and we are broken people – every religion in the world acknowledges it. What were we, then, before being broken? What carved the great schisms in our souls that cause us to be impatient and irritated, blood-thirsty and cruel? How were we shattered? And is it possible to gather the broken pieces together again? Or have they been tossed away like so many amputated limbs? When we view our collective pains as the results of fallen glory rather than simply distasteful behavior, a gentle glimmer of hope emerges.
For if we were, in fact, meant to be more, if we were endowed with worth that nothing can shake or break or tear from our souls, if our shock and sorrow at the depth of human brokenness reveals our collective history of once being something glorious, then is it not possible to hope we could be glorious again? A Hebrew poet said that we were knit together in our mother’s womb – could we dare to hope that that which has unraveled could one day be woven again into coverings of healing? That souls once severed could be restored? The frazzled yarn is still there… I guess good knitting is worth the wait, after all.
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