I am working on a chapter for someone's book. It's on faith. It requires me to read other books and articles on existentialism; so, in the process of all that, I came across a statement that grabbed hold of me.

I would have preferred that it hadn't.

I would have preferred that it had just let me go drifting along on the tops of words, skipping over sentences, and skimming paragraphs for something academically relevant but otherwise not very compelling. I just want to get this chapter finished!

What an annoying inconvenience, then, to become so disturbed by something. And it's not like I could really pretend I hadn't seen it.

Finding that statement among my reading was like shopping. My wife and I were in Wilmington, North Carolina, recently. We went into a mall there, and I told her she needed some clothes. Now, if it were up to her, she'd buy things for me all day long and then tell me we didn't have time to go shopping for her. Too bad she doesn't like to shop in electronic outlets; now, there's something you can really get into.

Anyway, so I told her that I wasn't having any of that avoidance stuff, and I forced her into a woman's clothing store. There was moaning and groaning and the gnashing of teeth; sounds Biblical doesn't it? Anyway, we got inside this store and I started saying, "What about this?" and "What about that?".

I was skimming. I found a pair of shoes for her with a leopard skin print on them. I said: "Now THIS is YOU!" She giggled a bit, but by that time she was into it, and she was starting to do more than skim. I roamed among the racks, and I found things that called out to me, and when I responded I found myself talking to my wife and telling her she had to get this, and she had to get that.

So, here is what I read that was challenging: "The speech of the other provokes a response in me and my response is at the same time my responsibility¿" That was written by Dermot Moran, in his Introduction to Phenomenology, in reference to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas.

Levinas wrote about the ethics of alterity — what we owe to one another simply because there IS an other. My wife needed some more clothes. Her speech to me was filled with avoidance, but my response to her was filled with responsibility. I took upon myself her need.

Philip Yancey described, in his book 'Rumors of Another World', the life of prisoners of war who had to work on the Burma-Siam railway during the Second World War. That was the group about which the movie 'The Bridge in the River Kwai' had been made.

Yancey described how the men had started out stealing from one another, fending just for themselves, and how life had become gruesome until one day a guard was about to shoot someone because the group would not divulge who had stolen a shovel. That's when the speech of that guard, and the need of that other prisoner, prompted a different kind of response.

One of the men stepped forward to confess having taken the shovel, and he was brutally beaten to death. Later that day it became apparent that the shovel had never been stolen at all. His response, and the burden of responsibility that he took upon himself, cost him his life.

From that day forward, the character of the camp changed, and people began to look after one another. They nursed the sick and infirm, and they shared with one another their strengths and resources.

The actions of that one man became a powerful speech that could not be forgotten; it demanded a response that was more than just skimming over the racks; it called forth accountability and responsibility.

I wonder how many times people around us speak in one form or another. It could be about something big or something small.

It's obvious sometimes, but other times it's like they are speaking to someone else, or not really speaking at all. It's possible to skim past them, as if they were a rack of unwanted clothes, but they really aren't.

Are they? If you see them — if you hear them, then they have spoken to you. It's as if they called out: "I am here." And the response to that is at once a responsibility.

"I am here," said the homeless person on Front Street.

"I am here," said the abused child in a family too ashamed to tell the nasty secret.

"I am here," said the neglected wife of an alcoholic.

"I am here."