When there was no internet or social media to while my time in the seventies, I love reading the Reader's Digest almost from cover to cover. Nowadays I barely read this iconic magazine or any magazines for that matter since I am preoccupied with playing games and reading blogs and other websites in my Kindle. One particular very short story from this magazine stands out in my memory.
The story was told by a man who used to be in an insane asylum. One day an intruder came by and they bumped into each other.The intruder stopped and looked at his face and just surprisingly quickly fled the asylum. The guy in the asylum made a conjecture in his story that this intruder was shocked that he, the "crazy" person, was human after all when they came face to face.
The second story I want to share is more poignant. During a sharing session in a meeting I have attended one of the members in the group told the story of his conversion from his dope addiction. It happened one night as he was totally out of it all in the sofa. When he woke up, he saw his two sons' eyes staring forlornly at him as they stood in front of him. Their sad eyes asked the question that changed his life: "Are we not enough?".
Nothing can compare to seeing the soul of another person when one looks into his or her eyes. One sees the humanity and the divinity of the person's being at the same time. He or she ceases to become an object or an abstraction. Perhaps this can explain why in many movie battle scenes they show the soldier's reluctance to shoot as he point his gun to an enemy looking at him with his pleading eyes. We have seen in most cases a change of mind but unfortunately not in every case and those eyes haunt him for the rest of his life. This is one of the sad realities of war.
I take this opportunity to thank the veterans for their sacrifice for us all.
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