The Means justify the End

Okay, listen to the following quote.

It's from an obscure title I recently stumbled upon at the back of a goodwill store one lazy Saturday afternoon.

The book is by Boris Simon (no, not the wrestler[?!]) who neatly documents the work of "Abbe Pierre and the Ragpickers of Emmaus," a community of France’s poorest who re-housed the homeless in post WWII France on land built on beggings and the sale of rags and bottles reclaimed from the trash heap.

What strikes me about the book, beside the fact that it was sandwiched between the Danielle Steeles (et al schlock), is how care-worn it is, as though countless individuals picked it up, and once in possession of this remarkable story, knew exactly how to put it down again.

There are many elements in the book that speak to me personally. I am (and remain at heart still) a former missionary who lived in the Holy Land and visited several times with a religious community located on site of the real Emmaus that modeled itself on the justice-leanings of Abbe Pierre.

Emmaus, as described in the New Testament (Lk 24: 13-35), is the famous travelogue after the Crucifixion, when a disguised Jesus joins two despairing believers on their journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, recounting to them in detail along the way the whole of redemption prophecy and its fulfillment— made miraculously manifest to them at the moment He breaks bread after they arrive at their destination.

So Emmaus is a symbol for making what is dead alive again. Which is probably why the good Abbot picked it for the name of his Start-up.

Here is the quote then:

“The man of mercy and justice has even less power to escape his calling than the artist, the musician, the ambitious or rich man. His passion feeds on that which he finds most constant in this world, that which is most varied and abundant: suffering and injustice. And this will never deceive him as love might deceive a lover. Evil is a sure thing. The man of mercy knows this, yet he will never cease refuting it.”

This quote puts into context not just "sure" Evil and the constant need to rebuke it's wiles and charms, but more powerfully, the surer struggle that brings redemption and reclamation, which we only seem to find on our own personal road to Emmaus …