THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

I have just returned from a large international and ecumenical church event in Munich. To give you an example of the scale of it, the exhibition area, where many of the lectures and seminars, as well as exhibitions, took place, is made up of twelve huge buildings each the size of a football pitch. These were filled with people for five days.
On Friday evening, in the Odeon Platz, there was an Orthodox Vespers entitled Service of a thousand tables, where blessed bread would be shared after the service. There were indeed a thousand tables, each with around ten people on them, and more people standing where there were no tables. The service was an hour and a half long, and it was bitterly cold.
That’s over ten thousand people, patiently working their way through a very unfamiliar kind of service and breaking bread with one another. There was more than enough bread, even for those who were standing, in fact the baskets were filled with left-overs. These were people of all Christian denominations (and, I suspect, some of none) coming together to share food. I sat with people I did not know, could barely converse with, and would never see again. It’s interesting to note that the word “company” means “with bread”, and we were indeed a great company.
My accommodation for the conference was with a family who had been instructed that they only needed to provide me with breakfast. Breakfast was rolls, bacon and eggs, all kinds of wonderful foods and a lovely pot of tea made especially for me. Well beyond their call of duty, I was feasted liberally every evening with a wonderful meal and good Bavarian beer besides.
The theme of the conference was “That you may have hope”. The world’s religions offer much in the way of hope on the packaging, but perhaps fall short, as we all humanly do. But it is in the kindness of strangers that hope is really to be found, and it is something that I find all over the place, sometimes where you least expect it. Kindness, of course, means treating others as if they were kin. I have found that it is more readily available than its opposite numbers cruelty and mean-mindedness.
On a recent television programme, the Reverend Peter Owen Jones existed for two weeks on the kindness of others. He noted that “If you are reliant on the goodness in others, that’s what you will find – the goodness in others. But that means making yourself vulnerable, which is not easy.” I didn’t need to go to his extremes to find the kindness of strangers but in their hospitality, I found the real truth in the theme of the conference. For it is in that generosity of the human spirit that you may have hope.