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Dear
Kathy:
PEACE!!!
JOY!!!
LOVE!!!
 I've
just finished the bulk of the work on the SASAC Web Site you were
the first to suggest.
It has left me exhausted. One thing kept me
going. For 12 years I
haven’t been able to visit our supporters and bring them up to date.
The Web Site will let them ‘see’ how much their love and generosity
are accomplishing here and now.
Forty years ago, it was more of a blessing than I realized at
the time that I met and talked to 90% of the people who would help
us help our poor.
They have been receiving my Monthly Letter since 1961 and know what
SASAC is all about. We have been able to ‘keep at it’ and do so much
to help our people all over the years because SASAC has been so personal. It
isn’t a huge 'impersonal' organization --like Oxfam, WHO, the Red
Cross, World Wild Life -- convincing millions of generous, but
really anonymous, people to
help millions of equally anonymous people some place in this
wide, wide world. Nor
is it a Government
organization pouring millions through government channels into
underdeveloped countries.
 Obviously the huge poverty problems of the world need these
huge sources of help. I’m not knocking them, or in any way
belittling them. In
fact I admire all the more people who give so generously to ‘the
general cause’, not knowing who precisely is being helped or
how. Efforts like ours
at SASAC can never compete with these organizations, much less
replace them. But still I believe there are people who want to go,
even need to go, the SASAC way. Let's face it.
What the poor
need most -- as all of us do --is love. SASAC is that: people
loving people, friends helping friends. Globalization is just one
more step in the de-personalization of life: monstrous faceless
organizations shaping and determining the lives of the faceless
‘teeming millions’. It may make economic sense but does it make
human sense? I’m still
so naïve I believe it’s not money, but ‘love that makes the world go
round’!
 What is SASAC? Here we think of it as truly a family,
brothers and sisters, on both sides of the globe, who believe in
God, the Father of us all, or who at least, believe in our common
humanity. We believe what we give each other first and foremost is
love and the respect, the intimacy, the sympathy, and the desire to
know each other better – all the things that ‘go with’
love.
Perhaps it is most like a family in this: there is no sense
of superiority, of condescension, of embarrassment, of resentment in
the give and take of our extended SASAC family life. Think of this. Not for a
moment do mothers and fathers who give essential, material help to
their babies think they are 'superior' to their babies, nor do they
disrespect or resent their babies because they need help, indeed
can't survive without help. Nor for a moment do they think their
babies give nothing in return. Is the joy, the wonder, the warmth,
the sense of fulfillment babies gives parents 'nothing'? Are
not both receivers and givers?
And are they not really equal? Parents give in love what
they have and can give.
Children give in love what they have and can
give.
 Strangely enough today, gratitude is not thought a virtue valuable,
indeed precious and essential in keeping our lives honest and
human. Gratitude should
fill us with joy. It
reminds us of how often and in how many ways our brothers, sisters,
friends have loved us.
Gratitude also keeps us humble. It reminds us of what we
must never forget in simple honesty and for our mental health. Each and every one of us is
‘a needy person’. From
the moment of birth to the moment of death, we need the love and the
help of a countless number of persons. One of the most ridiculous
myths is the myth of ‘the self-made man’ (or woman!). Certainly after God, we are
the principal agents in our own ‘making’, but all of us need a host
of ‘co-creators’ who help us in that making and truly make the
making of ourselves possible.
If all that doesn’t ‘make’ your head spin…
In our SASAC
family, --both Western and Eastern branches! --we try to remember
and to live those simple truths about love, and about the
relationship between persons who both love and are loved. Forty
years ago when I ‘conceived’ the idea of our SASAC family, I asked
our first sisters and brothers from the East Coast to the West Coast
in Canada to express their love in a simple, symbolic and
sacrificial act. I
asked them ‘to give up a little of their life, so that the poor in
our Himalayan area could have life’. In those days most families
ate their evening meal together. Obesity was not the
intractable problem it is today! So families ended their meals with
dessert. So I asked
those joining our SASAC family to give up Friday night dessert. I said the money saved from
that weekly sacrifice would be like the five loaves the little boy
gave Jesus on the hillside in Galilee. It would be multiplied by
the Lord to help literally thousands and thousands of our needy
brothers and sisters.
Never have I spoken truer words. Never in my wildest dreams,
did I imagine that such
tiny seeds of sacrifice and love would yield so abundant a harvest
in the lives of so, so many poor. The age of miracles is not
over, for sure!
 At SASAC we believe "small is beautiful'. Those of us in our
SASAC family who are Christians believe this because Jesus also was
'small and beautiful'. He didn't show his love by solving worldwide
problems. He was born in a small village, grew up in small,
insignificant Nazareth,
did his wonderful work of love in a small, despised country. He
didn't cure mobs of sick, or feed multitudes of hungry, in a
'big-organizational' way. He cured the sick by putting his loving
hand on each one of them. He fed the multitudes by blessing the
bread and making his disciples distribute it to each person in the
five thousand. Jesus wanted all persons to realize that He and His
Father loved them as a unique daughter, son, brother, sister . We
try to treat each poor person who comes to us at SASAC for help as
our own brother or sister, as the loved child of our Father. We
remember in joy and gratitude each SASAC brother and sister on
the other side of the globe who care enough to give up a little of their
lives, so our poor can live.
I do hope and pray that all who visit our SASAC Web-Site will
remember this. We are not a big organization solving the problem
of world poverty. We are a small group of people trying to
help poor people who need help. And as mothers and fathers
do for their children, we love the poor by teaching them and helping
them help themselves. Kathy, once again I have been carried away.
Forgive! A big ‘salaam’
to Jim, Jim Jr. and Kathleen. |
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