Possible Dreams International

I recently read an article about a black South African woman who was running an orphanage for children whose parents had fallen victim to HIV/AIDS. She was being interviewed for a television program and the interviewer asked her about her hopes and dreams in life – what she felt she wanted to achieve. She pondered this question for a few moments and said simply, “I want to have spent everything I have. When I meet my maker,” she added, “I want to have used up, totally and completely, every gift I have been given. I want to return to God empty-handed. When I have spent all God gave me, then I’ll be ready to go home.”

 The gift of empty-handedness is the gift that was passed on to me in my time in Swaziland. I had come to do, to teach, to share my professional skills, which I did. But what came back to me took me by such surprise. Each day hands reached out to me – to touch, to hold, to embrace, to share. They were emptied to enrich my life, to make me whole, to heal, and in so doing to make the world a more human, compassionate place. In their smallness, in their poverty, in their bare feet and AIDS racked bodies, the Swazis had mastered the gift of empty -handedness, of spending their gifts for others, of reminding me that the Kingdom of God is among us.

Sister Maureen McCarthy