“David, I think Greece is on the verge of another catastrophe,” Maria, the director of the Salvation Army branch in Athens, warned me last December. We were sipping Greek coffee at the organization’s headquarters in Athens, a building the size of an American small-town thrift shop which services a city of over four million. I was perplexed. Had Greece not already hit “rock bottom?” What further catastrophe could ravage a nation which had a third of its population close to or in poverty, or a 35 percent increase in suicides since 2011? Perhaps, I mused as the “optimistic American,” Maria’s prediction would be mistaken.
Needless to say, a cursory scan of front pages this summer proved Maria’s view prophetic. Despite a new “deal” between Greece and Europe, dark clouds of uncertainty still grip the nation. No real change in Greece’s largest problem, be it endemic corruption, a decaying safety net and toxic populism, is on horizon. During my junior year in Athens, I was honored to witness the heroic struggle of Maria, her husband Polis and the Salvation Army’s staff.
Every day, they enter into the crisis with remarkable fortitude against great odds. In her work with victims of human trafficking, Maria has discovered terrible collaboration between hotel owners, city police and pimps. She makes sure all the refugee women who come to the Salvation Army have someone to accompany them home for fear of kidnapping. On a visit, I once saw a member of Golden Dawn, Greece’s fascist party, outside. He apparently stands near their office for a few moments every week to intimidate immigrant families coming inside. A few weeks before, party members marched through this predominantly immigrant neighborhood, chanting hateful slogans and waving Neo-Nazi flags. In their acts of service, Maria and her husband Polis encounter not only tragedy, but evil underneath the surface of a “civilized” European country.
These are extreme examples of the daily trials their vocation requires. Families who constantly come pleading for baby milk, diapers and food cannot always be helped. The Salvation Army operates on a limited budget, as they refuse to accept government funds, knowing of many NGOs ruined by the statist, corrupt tentacles of Greece’s bureaucracy. As a Protestant organization in an Orthodox country, many potential donors reject them as insufficiently “Greek,” all the more so for devoting so many resources to migrant families instead of “their own people.” Given the economic deterioration, there is sometimes not much that can be done beyond the provision of basic resources, prayer and a warm embrace. Their work is remarkable, but how can it ever contend with the scale of the problems before them?
It is in such encounters with continued despair that the true nature of the heart is revealed. What happens to your commitment when idealistic visions of progress are no longer possible, when the arc of history does not seem to bend any closer to justice? What happens to your generosity when your efforts seem unappreciated and your impact invisible? Such crises are judgments; they reveal to us, as Dostoevsky wrote, that “love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
Such moments expose those whose service to others was simply out of loyalty to ideological causes or, even worse, a subtle manifestation of one’s own egotism and need to control others. But such judgments also reveal the love that “always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
The Greek crisis has indeed made visible the hearts of Maria, Polis and countless others in Greece. Tuesday mornings at Salvation Army are filled with joy as dozens of screaming migrant children run around with toys, finger paint and learn letters and colors. The joyful and sacrificial spirit of Maria and Polis amply proved Mother Teresa’s maxim that our life’s aim is faithfulness, not success. Yet this faithfulness brings its own small victories for Salvation Army, like a new senior citizen program and a freely donated building for children’s activities. The seeds of a renewed Greece blossom silently in this remote Athenian charity building.
Maria and Polis exemplify an alternative path forward for idealistic millennials today, the “Generation TED” constantly fed with well-intentioned but frequently naive slogans about optimism, change and achievement. In high school and Bowdoin, we have been identified as change makers who can, as Thomas Paine mused, “begin the world anew.” Alternately, Maria and Polis exhibit Reinhold Niebuhr’s “pessimistic optimism,” conscious of the “tragic realities of life and history,” and both the limitations and necessity of moral choices in the movement of history. Struggling to keep alive human dignity in a fallen world is a mighty task. But it is a struggle worthy of their, and our own, lives.