By Sister Nellie Zarraga ICM

Going to Mongolia feels like going to the end of the world.  From bustling Beijing or any other metropolis, one catches a plane or a train that flies or chugs over vast frozen steppes for a long time before one sees here and there evidence of life.

And life there is!

Sr Nellie, 2nd from the left, and Bishop Wens Padilla, far right, with friends outside a ger

Whether you go to the Joy Supermarket run by the Showoo village people, or the Rainbow Special Children’s Development Center with ten children taught by four teachers, or the National Mental Hospital Children’s Section where two of our young people organize educational activities for the 30 children there, or Sts Peter and Paul Parish, where the youth are now busy preparing for the Christmas liturgy, or the evening English classes organized for the working people or struggling students, one feels the preference for the people at the margins.  Life with the marginal people vivifies and enriches us!

As I look back at these months since September when our Rainbow Center started, a thought that carried me as I went about the business of each day was one shared by Barbara, the American volunteer speech therapist who drops into the Center in her spare time from the International School.  She said something like this:  before we can improve a special child’s speech, we need to be able to observe and learn how the child is making the mistake.  Only then can we suggest a way of producing the new sound from the mistake being made.

Wow!  The children become the teachers, showing us observers how they make their sounds. We become the learners, observing how the children producing their unique sounds that we consider ‘mistakes’!

When I’m ready to observe carefully, to care deeply enough to create in my own system the sound that the child is creating, I become the ready student to whom learning comes eventually, rewarded by discovering an effective path leading the child to a new sound!  Isn’t this the age-old Zen saying:  ‘When the student is ready, the master will come’?

Isn’t that another way of realizing the doctrine of the Incarnation?   The Son of God came into our world two thousand years ago, and yet still takes on flesh every time we are ready to receive Him in our hearts.  He is born once more into hearts that have been waiting in anticipation for their Savior.   He enters once more into dwellings of people who make space for Him in their ger-‘inn.’

May our ministry at the margins of our society be one of welcoming the Savior in the hearts of our people, in our own hearts!  And as Medical Mission Sister Miriam sings:  ‘Be brave with the burden you are blessed to bear, for it’s Christ that you carry, everywhere!’  God-be-with us, Emmanuel!