Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much

    Russians didn't  need to be taught to sacrifice their lives for others: they were ready to give away everything at a difficult moment, even to die for others in a disaster. The question was, what about the rest of the time? As one of our humorists said, "You need disaster to make people kind, but in good times people are like wolves."

    In that connection, I remember a story I once read in our local newspaper back in 1991 about an older woman in my home town, who was dying of hunger in her one-room apartment. To the right and to the left, above her and below her, were neighbors, but none of them, it seemed, could find five minutes to knock at her door and find out if she was still there, if she was alive. When there was no food left in the apartment, the woman lit a burner on the gas stove, switched off the electricity, lay down on her bed so she could see the flame. Perhaps the flame helped her forget her loneliness or helped her to pray. So she died.

A year later, someone asked the people in the apartment house, "When did you last see this woman, your neighbor?"

The neighbors sent for the police. When the door was broken down, they were horrified, but not by the tragedy. They were horrified by the thought that all of them could have died, if the gas had spread through the building!

"The house might have exploded!" they said. Only later they got embarrassed because they thought first of themselves.

Many of us had gotten into the habit of being indifferent. While thinking about achieving "great victories” we had gotten used to passing by the poor, the lonely, and the deprived. Was it because all of us were equally deprived? Perhaps.