A different flame

It is almost midnight. A solemn veil of smoke covers the little stars as they peep their silver eyes through the dense darkness.


I close my eyes and I can hear crying.


I often do, you know.


The day before yesterday, someone started a fire which has claimed the lives of hundreds of people in our 'garden state'.


They were burnt alive while driving in their cars. While protecting their children, their homes.


There were so many casualties that the Alfred hospital, a large tertiary hospital with every 'cutting edge' technology known to humankind available, ran out of morphine.


When a western hospital runs out of 'morph', you know things are bad.


Australia is in mourning. The prime minister wept today. The premier of Victoria wept. Everyone seems to be weeping....

I know another place where they often run out of 'morph'.


Its a little hospital in the lush green mountains of Southern Africa.


There will be weeping there too this night.


Siteki is a town with more coffin salesmen than grocery stores.

If you sleep on the hospital grounds you hear the moaning, the screaming of people with all the complications of untreated HIV.


Cryptococcal meningitis, multi drug resistant tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis and every opportunistic infection under the yellow african sun.


Their life expectancy is 30.


Its a funny concept isnt it? 'Life expectance'. What we can expect from a life....


Well funny as it may be... In Swaziland you can expect 30 years.... Just 30 years....


As I sit here tonight, I wonder if theres any spot on this blue earth which has not been touched by heartbreak. By woundedness.

I wonder what deep wound in the mind caused that person to light these fires? To re-light them when they went out?

I wonder what wound causes us to close our eyes to the suffering of those who are far away in places like Africa....To think that just because someone is out of sight, that their pain is less real.

I wonder what causes us to seek endlessly to divide the world. To judge and demean and hate because people are different.

I dont claim to know the nature of our wounds.

But I think I know the cure.


When I was last in Swaziland, we heard of a grandmother who had taken in 8 children after her daughter had died of AIDS. Here are some of them....






She worked in the maize fields to support them.

One day when she was at work, one of the children was playing a little to close to the fire.

And her whole house burnt down.






In an instant everything was gone. Every piece of furniture, every shirt, every dress, every plate, every toy,




When we found them, the whole family were sleeping on old cardboard boxes.


My friend, Jacque, told me that someone had sent a box of clothes.

It wasn't food. It wasn't money. And it definitely wasn't a new house....

Just a box of second hand clothes.

We took it to her...

When she opened it.... She began to weep, pointing her arms heavenwards saying " Oh Hallelujah, Hallelujah".

In my whole life I have never witnessed gratitude that broad. That deep. That wide.

In that moment it was clear to me, that I was watching the sun rise.

That somehow in some unspeakable way, the warm arms of the universe had wrapped themselves around her and said:

"Beloved, I have not forgotten. I will never forget."



The cure for a wound is love.

Im not talking about a sentimental love which is always fairy floss, sunny skies and ferris wheels.

But rather, the love which dares to hold a hand in the dark night of anothers soul.

Which can wipe away a tear, without claiming to have 'all the answers'.

Which steps into the fire and says "How can I help you?"

Im talking about the kind of love that is measured in nameless acts of gentleness.
In fearless words of grace.

A love which is not random. But conscious.

A love which is awake.


So tonight, in this midnight hour as I hear the cries of a wounded world rise up around me.

I sense a different flame burning in the hearts of humankind.

Stronger than any destruction, any sickness, any wound, any fear...

It is calling us to wake up.

To love the world into change,

Maithri