If you were a Hutu...

"To care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done the same. And when others give life, I could have done the same. The we experience that we can be present to the soldier who kills, to the guard who pesters, to the young man who plays as if life has no end, and to the old man who stopped playing out of fear for death.
By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful, but the powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take away our pain, but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community." - Henri Nouwen

This is a lengthy, but beautiful and powerful quote. I love the idea that nothing human is foreign to us. It means that I can recognize the holiness and the darkness in everyone around me- simply because I know it in myself.
A couple of years ago in a class at university the class was having a discussion about the Rwandan genocide in 1994. We were discussing whose fault the genocide was. Where we could point our Eurocentric fingers. The professor looked directly at a friend of mine and asked, " If you were there, and you were a Hutu, do you think you could have been one of the killers?" He continued, " Do you think if you had been raised in that environment and literally were in the shoes of a Hutu rebel- do you think you could have used a machete?" - The class was stunned at the direct pointedness of the question and I think even more perplexed by my friends answer. He said, "yes" - that maybe if he had been there- he would have been a killer too. What I understand now, is that my friend saw the humanity in the awful situation and he understood that "nothing human is foreign to us." I am obviously not telling this story to say that killing is good- but there was something almost holy in recognizing that there is no "us" and "them" - there really is no other...only "we". My friend understood this years ago and I am continuing to learn what it means to see people's humanness. I think I am starting to see, like Henri Nouwen argues, that only when we embrace our sameness as humans, can we ever care for people in the way that God does and longs us to do also.