Good people

The Lord created man in the best condition, in the best form, with the quality of ahsan-i taqwim. But He also gave that same human being a faculty by which he can sink down to the lowest of the created. Despite this lofty condition in the creation of the human being, the baseness he displays from time to time leaves one in amazement and horror.

This amazement and horror increasingly shapes the general perception of the human being. The abundance of human conditions that leave us in horror brings us to the point of exhausting our hopes for humanity. You come to the point of saying, "Where has that ahsan-i taqwim gone?"

In fact, the greater number of bad examples comes in part from people's greater inclination to talk about evils. People are not inclined to talk much about good deeds. When they see an evil, even when they sense the possibility of an evil or receive news of an evil, they are more prone to spread it. Yet what comes to the word also comes to the head. What is put into words surely has an effect. When you put an evil into words a great deal, even in order to condemn it, it becomes inevitable that this word affects reality and builds its own reality.

The Gospel of John begins with "In the beginning was the Word." This word has a distinct place among words. The "Word" meant is God Himself. Reconciling it with our theology is of course somewhat problematic, but it has not been dismissed out of hand either. The word has a divine effect. It has a dimension that builds and determines reality, that establishes worlds.

In the political dimension of the life we live, for instance, do we not notice how much we love talking about evils? Do we not see what kind of social lust someone's wickedness stirs up in people? Do you think people have their tongues full only to curse evil, to revile it further and drive it out of life? Does not the way of speaking about evils too take place as a kind of ritual of joining in the evil? In the end, does it not have the effect of spreading evil further and normalizing it?

Our ears, pricked up at news about someone's thefts, corruption, political jackalry, whether they are fit for their office, their moral weaknesses, become so soiled that we begin to suppose the world consists of only that. Our journeys always remain in the lowest of the low.

Yet there are also good people in the world, and good deeds. Splendid pictures, many of which do not motivate spreading because they are not much talked about, do not become news, and arouse no lust in those who hear of them... The example of Abdülazim of Libya, who put his life on the line for others, did not even get proper coverage in our media. Yet for days no other event should have been on our agenda. Perhaps through the words spent on and multiplied around this good example we could have opened wider windows onto a better world.

Let us not give up trying to open those windows. Let us talk about good deeds. Let us leave aside the words that slowly consume us, soil us and sink our world into ever deeper depths, such as who committed what crimes with whom, who stole what, who said what foul words, who is fit for his office and who is not.

For instance, today I invite you to see the gardens of paradise blooming in the great hearts of the people who have devoted themselves to helping those who have been forced to take refuge in the camps opened along Turkey's Syrian border.

The day before yesterday we visited the camps opened by the IHH in Azaz and Afrin, which shelter more than 200 thousand refugees. They are camps that, as a result of the greatest evils that one human being can do to another, shelter wounded-hearted people torn from their homelands, their fathers, their mothers, their spouses and children.

But there too you can see the heroes of humanitarian aid who, doing what they can in the face of this cruelty, have devoted themselves to helping people who have fallen into this condition, and who thereby display the highest levels of humanity.

Is not this in fact the very nature of the matter? Where evil is at its lowest, the possibility of displaying the highest level of goodness also arises. Evil and goodness, at their highest and lowest levels, are very close to each other.

The camps that the IHH set up in Syria long before the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations serve 200 thousand refugees today, within the security zone provided by the Turkish Armed Forces and the ÖSO and under the general coordination of AFAD, with tremendous discipline, order and a volunteerism that makes itself felt at the highest level.

At the heart of these activities you feel nothing but the desire for goodness: no political calculation, no forward-looking career planning, no wish to settle accounts for anger felt toward someone. There is an orphan whose head is to be stroked, a person whose need is to be met, a child of man whose tears are to be dried and who is to be comforted. At that moment it is worth stopping the world. They stop it and do what they have to do.

You see with your own eyes that a very different world is possible, from the activities of young people, each more radiant than the other, who seem to have come from other worlds and are focused solely on humanitarian aid.

During our visit an event was held under the heading "braids for both hair and hearts." An apparently simple activity aimed at girls aged 2 to 7. Volunteer hairdressers who came from all over Turkey combed, styled and braided the hair of 2 thousand girls, most of them orphans, living in the Siccu and Şemmarin camps in Azaz, fastened their hair clips and gave them gifts.

A tremendously moving activity. Stroking the head of an orphan is an act that our glorious Messenger described as among the loftiest of rewarded deeds. I can assure you that by touching that orphan's head with that compassion and that mercy, you do the most revolutionary work in the world.

My God, how a tiny body has taken on the burden of the world. Can those sorrowful eyes, which at a tiny age saw the deaths of their mothers, fathers and siblings in the rubble of their homes destroyed by bombs raining down upon them, which witnessed all the lights of the world going out, forget everything with one stroke of the head and see the possibility of another life?

Even if they do not, it becomes a goodness that touches the hearts of those who stroke that head, and do not worry at all.

What about Tülay Gökçimen, one of the IHH's humanitarian aid volunteers who organized the activity, loving, stroking and embracing each child as her own? What about her organizing volunteers from all over Turkey, bringing them and having them touch these oppressed hearts?

Be sure that it is these touches that will change the world.