By Jennifer Mains
Published December 1998
In these days, while we are surrounded by fear and anxiety, we are lulled into passivity. We watch as others experience job loss, massive cutbacks, and the consequences (initiatives) of the ‘common sense’ revolution. At the same time we nod approval to the claims of economic growth and fiscal responsibility.
In his book Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm, Philip Hallie describes how he and his family stand before a glass door, watching, spellbound, as a hurricane uproots and destroys a large chestnut tree outside their home. He is fascinated that they do not move out of danger but are drawn to watching the destruction happening before them.
Hallie uses the hurricane as a metaphor to describe our capacity to be in the midst of evil, stand in awe of it, and yet remain immobile.
This book is a compelling story of one man’s struggle to understand the ethics of good and evil in our lives. Hallie explores this through a series of larger and smaller stories, stories of people who have resisted the evil.
There are larger stories, such as the one about Pastor Trocme of the village of Chambon, France. When the Nazis demanded that he surrender all Jewish people hiding in the village, he stoutly refused. There is story of Joshua James of Hull, Maine, a volunteer lifesaver who, with his crew, saved hundreds of lives from the vicious storms and gales of the east coast.
But, there are smaller stories of the villagers of Chambon, members of Trocme’s Huguenet parish, who welcomed Jewish refugees into their homes over a period of four years, without question. There is the story of the villagers of Hull who ventured out into the storm to watch Captain James and his crew attempt to rescue a floundering ship. When the returning rescue boat capsized near the shore, and all seemed lost, the villagers responded and formed a human chain into the raging sea waters. Done without question!
These people had nothing, logically, to gain by extending their hands. Hallie argues, “It is not always conductive to self-preservation or comfort or security to help the stranger.” There are not people who acted according to any rationally prescribed ‘common sense’ rules of behaviour.
Hallie’s lifelong quest was to understand why such people responded as they did, when so many others around them remained immobile. During his many years of research into the ethics of good and evil he would ask people, “Why did you do it?”
The response that perhaps best epitomizes the spirit of these people comes from Madame Trocme. When Hallie comments that the people of Chambon were good people, she angrily retorts that he has misunderstood her. “We have been talking about saving the children,” she said. “We did not do what we did for goodness’ sake. We did it for the children.”
The answer Hallie found to this very complex question of why people reach out, at great personal risk, to respond to those in need, was simple – habit. The villagers of Chambon could no turn away a refugee because it was their habit to welcome the stranger. The villagers of Hull could not watch sailors drown because it was their habit to respond to those in distress. Hallie came to understand that “habit can be second nature, as much a part of our feelings and behaviours as the physical traits we were born with.”
But what Hallie also discovered is that habit must be taught, shown by example. It is not inborn. The stories, both large and small, teach is that habit is what allows us to live out compassion.
The hurricane may swirl around us, but there is an eye to this storm, a place of quiet, a peace that lies in all of us. It is from this place that Hallie calls us to respond, to enlarge the eye – the calm – and “push away the indifference, the greed and the rage that surrounds the hurricane.”
Recently, here in Kitchener, a group of people were sharing their own ‘hurricane’ stories of pain and sorrow. The mood in the room was solemn. Then, quietly, one woman spoke. She admitted that the stories she had heard overwhelmed her. She said she couldn’t solve all the problems of the world, but what she did do each morning was to think about the small things she could do that might make a difference in another person’s life.
A small story. A simple habit.
