Mountains Beyond Mountains

The book Mountains Beyond Mountains, written by Tracy Kidder, tells the story of Paul Farmer's efforts to improve health in Haiti. This book has many inspiring qualities that warrant mention. However, one seems more salient than the rest. For me, the example of caring for the poor came from Christ. I have a strong faith that not only does Christ live, but that He approves and encourages us to love and care for others, especially the poor. There is an excerpt from the book that addresses Dr. Farmer's experience with contrasting appreciations of faith in the two dominating venues of his life, Harvard and Haiti.

The combination of Harvard and Haiti had begun to form a new kind of belief in Farmer. He would tell me years later: "The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor-- not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too-- made me even more convinced that faith must be something good."

And if the landless peasants of Cange needed to believe that someone omniscient was keeping score, by now Farmer felt the need to believe something like that himself. In the peasant phrase, an unnecessary death was "a stupid death," and he was seeing a lot of those. "Surely someone is witnessing this horror show?" he'd say to himself. "I know it sounds shallow, the opiate thing, needing to believe, palliating pain, but it didn't feel shallow. It was more profound than other sentiments I'd known, and I was taken with the idea that in an ostensibly godless world that worshiped money and power, or more seductively, a sense of personal efficacy and advancement, like at Duke and Harvard, there was still a place to look for God, and that is in the suffering of the poor.

This quote resonates with me because it echoes the fundamental frequency that drives my work too. Faith is something good. God can be found in serving the poor. So when we feel overwhelmed by academia and get too caught up with money or our own personal accomplishments, it is essential that we look beyond ourselves to others. There are infinite types of poverty and I propose, that like Farmer, as we serve we will find that believing won't feel shallow but will perhaps lead us to the most complete feeling of wholeness possible to attain.