“Mind if I wash your windscreen?” he asked. Before I could say no, he was already onto the side windows. Within five minutes, the windows of my humble Daihatsu Mira were spotless.
He was fashionably dressed for a saint. I noticed feeling a strange calmness as I stood in his presence. I then realised he was babbling a name which sounded like that of my friend. He also shared her dark eyes and tall forehead. I asked him his name. He told me. Yep, it was her brother.
I gave him $20 for a phone card and told him to call his sister. I then tried contacting my friend to tell her I had found him. When she returned my message, it seemed she had lost it completely. Perhaps she had joined the ranks of the saints.
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Then a few days ago, a prominent Sydney Muslim identity asked me if I could fill in for him at an Easter ceremony with Reverend Bill Crews. Each year, Bill holds a ceremony where he emulated Christ who washed the feet of his disciples during the last hours leading up to his arrest.
Muslims have a horrible habit of turning up late. One Muslim stand-up comic from the United States even suggested governments should start naming hurricanes and cyclones with Muslim names to allow more time to de-populate affected areas. I kept the lateness tradition going.
In the distance, I could see Bill standing with the saints. They were dressed in their finest - non-matching clothes, ripped shoes, dishevelled hair. Dressed like true saints.
The Prophet Mohammed’s mosque had a special platform where his homeless followers, known as As-hab as-Suffah (literally “People of the Bench”), lived. From Suffah, we get the word “Sufi”, literally meaning “saint”. The Prophet’s followers often were too poor to afford shelter, were severely depressed or had other ailments.
The Prophet also taught that people who had lost their sense of sanity were not fully responsible for their actions in the sight of God. So the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill, are true saints.
Easter is about Christ, a great man who saw the inherent worth of all human beings. Even tax collectors and sex workers and lepers, those whom the rest of society wrote off. Christ always made time for the saints of his time. If we want to be Christ-like, we should make time for the saints of our era.
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