“If the brief meeting of a stranger can awaken in us a longing that this world has no time to satisfy, perhaps we were made for a place where no good meeting ends in goodbye.”
Where No Good Meeting Ends in Goodbye
My wife and I were wandering around Princess Square in Glasgow with that pleasant little problem familiar to anyone surrounded by restaurants: too much choice. We looked at one menu, then another. Perhaps Italian? Maybe something light? Possibly somewhere we had eaten before? All the while, I am balancing these ordinary decisions with the reality of pancreatic cancer, so choosing what and where to eat can sometimes feel like a decision of rather more than ordinary importance.
Then, quite unexpectedly, lunch ceased to be the most interesting thing happening.
We met a family from Lahore in Pakistan who were visiting Glasgow. There was nothing dramatic about the encounter, no great event to report; we simply began talking. Yet almost immediately there was a warmth about them that caught my attention, one of those difficult-to-define moments when strangers somehow cease to feel entirely strange.
I have a custom when I leave home each day: I often pray that God will bring someone across my path. I realise that may sound unusual to some people, but I have done it for years, and remarkably often someone appears. Not necessarily someone who needs anything from me, nor someone to whom I have something profound to say. Sometimes it is simply another human being whom, for reasons I cannot entirely explain, I am glad to have met. This family was like that.
What particularly moved me were the son and daughter. They were respectful and attentive while we spoke. There was none of that sense that the younger members of the family were merely waiting impatiently for the adults to finish. They were present; they listened and participated in that quiet way. When eventually we parted, every member of the family shook our hands.
It was such a small thing: a handshake, a smile, a few words exchanged between people whose lives, until that moment, had been unfolding thousands of miles apart. Yet something had happened. For a few minutes, the categories by which we so often arrange humanity became unimportant. Pakistani and Scottish, visitor and resident, Muslim and Christian perhaps; whatever our differences might have been, they did not need to disappear for us to recognise something more fundamental in one another. Here was another family: parents who loved their children, young people being raised with courtesy and dignity, human beings making their way through the strange and beautiful business of life, just as we were.
Then came the part of such encounters that has always troubled me a little. We said goodbye, they walked one way through Princess Square and we walked another, and within moments the crowd had swallowed them up. It is one of the peculiar sorrows of human life that we can sometimes feel an immediate affection for people we are almost certain never to see again. For a few minutes two stories touch, and then they separate.
They will return home carrying their memories of Scotland, while my wife and I will return to our own life. Their children will grow older. Years will pass. There will be birthdays and joys, disappointments and discoveries, marriages perhaps, children perhaps, and all the unexpected turns that make up a human life. Whole chapters will be written in their story of which we shall know absolutely nothing. And yet, for those few minutes in Glasgow, our stories crossed.
Why should that affect us? Why should someone who was a stranger only minutes before leave behind a faint sense of loss when they disappear? Perhaps there is something within us that protests against the brevity of human connection. We are forever meeting people for whom there is not enough time. We discover a kindness just as the conversation must end. We glimpse something admirable in another person just as the train arrives, the holiday finishes, the meal ends, or somebody glances at the clock and says, “Well, we must be going.” In a curious way, we spend our lives beginning relationships that time does not allow us to finish.
For those of us who believe in God, there is another possibility; some encounters are not meant to be possessed or prolonged; they are simply meant to be received. A stranger does not have to become a lifelong friend for the meeting to have meaning. God may occasionally allow two human lives to touch briefly so that each might carry away a little evidence of the goodness in the other.
That family from Lahore gave me such a gift in Princess Square. They reminded me that goodness does not belong to one nationality, one culture or one corner of the earth. We encounter it in parents and children, in courtesy and attentiveness, in hospitality and humour, and in the simple willingness to stop and recognise the humanity of someone whose life may be very different from our own.
I am convinced that strange sadness we sometimes feel when good people disappear into the crowd is telling us something. If the brief meeting of a stranger can awaken in us a longing that this world has no time to satisfy, perhaps we were made for a place where no good meeting ends in goodbye.
I cannot know whether I will ever see that family again, and in the ordinary course of things I probably will not. But my belief has taught me to be careful with the word never. There is something wonderfully unfinished about the Christian understanding of human life: goodbye need not necessarily mean the end of the story.
For now, I am simply grateful that among all those people moving through Princess Square that day, our paths crossed. My wife and I had gone in looking for somewhere to eat, studying menus and wondering what might satisfy our hunger. Yet we came away having received something that was never written on any menu: a brief encounter with strangers who, for a few precious minutes, did not feel like strangers at all.