Who's My Neighbor?

I just got my copy of Outside magazine in the mail the other day. In the August issue, there's an article by Patrick Symmes about Burma just before Cyclone Nargis hit. Symmes left Burma a day before Nargis came to town and relates the details of a corrupt military dictatorship driven by superstition and such profound greed that not only robbed the Burmese people of desperately needed aid from foreign NGOs, but punished local citizens that attempted to alleviate suffering. No one in Burma had a clue about what would happen until hours before the cyclone hit.

Symmes' article detailed the Orwellian, Pyongyang-style creepiness of the junta's dictatorship. I spend my days at work at a computer reading about evil, oppressive governments and dictators with freakish proclivities and bizarre personality flaws. Stuff like this doesn't shock me anymore, although that doesn't make it any less horrible. The thing that jumped out me from this article was something seemingly more mundane.

Last September, Burma experienced what's now known as the Saffron Revolution. Thousands of Buddhist monks led pro-democracy protests across Burma. The junta put a quick end to the protesters. The official body count puts the death toll at 31, but human rights groups claim the number was in the hundreds.

After the cyclone, the only truly effective internal relief came from Buddhist monks who led truck convoys into the Irawaddy Delta to offer food and shelter to victims at village temples.

I don't believe that all worldviews are equally valid or all roads lead to heaven. Following that idea to its logical conclusion is saying that the ideas of Nicolai Ceaucescu or Stalin are just as good as Gandhi's or Mother Theresa's. Most people would agree that's completely silly.

However, I do think that everyone is responsible for using the truth that they have. Certain ideals are transcendent regardless of culture. Theft, murder, and greed are universally condemned, regardless if someone is Christian, Buddhist, or Jewish. If the Burmese generals don't have some sense that what they do is wrong, they wouldn't have anything to fear from the Buddhist monks and they wouldn't work so hard at hiding their actions from the rest of the world.

And as for the action taken by the Buddhist in the wake of the cyclone, if they didn't have a sense that there was a right thing to do, they would have only been concerned about saving themselves instead of taking care of their homeless and hungry neighbors. I highly doubt that Campus Crusade ever showed up at their doorstep to hand them a pamphlet on the Four Spiritual Laws and pray with them to get "saved" and there are the born-again types who would say that if they don't fill that Sinner's Prayer square, they're going to hell. I don't buy that. Only God really knows what's inside a person. Christ used the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate that actions speak louder than the appearance of piety or the letter of the law. Samaritans at that time were despised by the Jews because of their partial pagan ancestry and the fact that their religion wasn't in line with the teaching of mainstream Judaism. They were considered unclean. The Buddhist monks were the ultimate Good Samaritans who didn't have to ask, "Who is my neighbor?" I find it hard to believe that there won't be a place for them in heaven.