I’ve been getting ready to preach on community for quite a few months now. One of the things I do is any note, article, quote or idea having anything to do with community gets thrown in a folder. As I was going through the folder today I came across a reference from my niece’s blog. Here’s part of it.

Robert Fulghum tells a story about Alexander Papaderos, a Greek man who worked to heal the hurts and hatred between the Germans and the Cretans, wounds which have existed since WWII, when the Nazis invaded the island of Crete and were met by villagers wielding kitchen knives and hay scythes. The retribution by the Germans was horrible, and whole villages were lined up and shot for assaulting Hitler’s finest troops.

Papaderos, a native of Crete, has established an institute to heal the wounds of war on the site of those horrible events. Once, Fulghum got the chance to ask him if he knew the meaning of life. He tells it this way:

Papaderos held up his hand and stilled the room and looked at me for a long time, asking with his eyes if I was serious and seeing from my eyes that I was. “I will answer your question.”

Taking his wallet out of his hip pocket, he fished into a leather billfold and brought out a very small round mirror, about the size of a quarter.

And what he said went like this:

“When I was a small child, during the war, we were very poor and we lived in a remote village. One day, on the road, I found the broken pieces of a mirror. A German motorcycle had been wrecked in that place.

“I tried to find all the pieces and put them together, but it was not possible, so I kept only the largest piece. This one. And by scratching it on a stone I made it round. I began to play with it as a toy and became fascinated by the fact that I could reflect light into dark places where the sun would never shine—in deep holes and crevices and dark closets. It became a game for me to get light into the most inaccessible places I could find.

“I kept the little mirror, and as I went about my growing up, I would take it out in idle moments and continue the challenge of the game. As I became a man, I grew to understand that this was not just a child’s game but a metaphor for what I might do with my life. I came to understand that I am not the light or the source of the light. But light—truth, understanding, knowledge—is there, and it will only shine in many dark places if I reflect it.

“I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have I can reflect light into the dark places of this world—into the black places in the hearts of men—and change some things in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.”

And then he took his small mirror and, holding it carefully, caught the bright rays of daylight streaming through the window and reflected them onto my face and onto my hands folded on the desk.

This is a great concept. We’re all part of a broken mirror and the more we come into community the more the mirror gets put back together.