Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.
― Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Price of Abissinia

In 2008, I went with a group of Iowa volunteers on a mission trip to Nigeria. The children in this photo are but a few of the many who greeted us openly and wanted to hold our hands as we walked from one spot to another. I recall spreading my fingers on both hands as far as they could go, so that ten kids could each hold a finger. During our three weeks there, we visited both urban and rural areas, schools, libraries, and villages. Both this trip and my family’s year of hosting a Nigerian high school student were life-changing.

You think you know what an African country might look like, how the people might live. And then you actually go there and realize that the distance that has separated you from this place and these people is much more than geographical distance. You’ve been distanced culturally, psychologically, politically, and morally. Truth be told, you might as well be visiting another planet–heck, another galaxy!–as another continent. It’s as if you’ve been standing on a metaphorical mountain top where you’ve looked out on people that, from this distance, bear more resemblance to insects than humans. Perhaps at this distance, you’ve tried to explain things you’ve haven’t experienced, or you’ve romanticized peoples and places you’ve never known. Maybe this distance, as Samuel Johnson writes, has had the same effect on the mind as on the eye: what you can’t see is what you can’t know.

In a recent Newsweek opinion piece, Nigerian Anglican priest and journalist, Hassan John, sends a desperate warning to the West that he argues has largely ignored–and continues to ignore–the genocide in central Nigeria. He writes:

The central region of Nigeria has been trapped in a slow-motion genocide for over a decade now. More than 35,000 Christians have been massacred. Whole villages have been exterminated. Thirteen thousand churches and 1,500 Christian schools have been destroyed. More than two million have been displaced from their homes, and 304,000 are refugees. According to the International Red Cross, by September of last year 23,000 had gone missing.

According to John, the Fulani (cattle herdmen he claims are working with the Islamic militant group Boko Haram) aim to rid Nigeria of Christians. He laments that the government of Nigeria has described the massacres (the Fulani armed with machetes) as clashes between farmers and herders who are both at fault. Jonah Jang and David Mark, former high-ranking military officers and members of the Nigerian Senate, have argued that the way that these attacks were carried out bore the markings of a planned and orchestrated genocide.

Tragically, this is just one example of genocide in the world today. For me, however, it’s one I can see clearly and feel deeply because I’ve gone the distance to experience this country and love its people. Danny, our former foreign exchange student, lives in Kaduna State where there have been many such massacres. Danny who lived safely in our home for a year, who joined our small rural Midwestern community and whose biggest concern during the time he lived here was whether or not he remembered his clothes for basketball practice. Distance may literally separate us by thousands of miles now, but it can’t separate me from the horrific scenes that play out in my mind. It’s impossible to use distance to swaddle myself in ignorance. When I read reports of this ongoing genocide, for me, it’s all too real.

The former president of the University of Notre Dame, Rev. Thedore Hesburgh, writes: All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance. From an agreeable, safe distance, it’s all too easy to suggest the kinds of humanitarian and military aid we should offer countries like Nigeria, Myanmar, Syria, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sadly, we are experts at practicing this kind of virtue at a distance. We may argue that we can’t possibly have firsthand experiences in all of these places, that our current technology offers us a nearly firsthand experience. And all this is true. Still–and perhaps I’m speaking mostly to myself–distance serves as a buffer so that we can be virtuous from the comfort and safety of our own arm chairs. There can be, and often is, sanctuary in distance.

At times, there is some necessity in out of sight, out of mind. Our psyches would implode if we took in all the suffering of the world, if we let the buffer that distance supplies dissolve, bringing us face to face with the atrocities we only read about and experience through media. In Robert Frost’s poem, “Out, Out–” he tells the story of a young boy who suffers a fatal accident while cutting wood. As the doctor is summoned, the onlookers wait. Frost writes:

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

There are times when we turn away because we are not the one dead. We turn away because we must create some distance between ourselves and tragedy–at least initially. Later, we often revisit and reconsider what we’ve seen and experienced. Distance in geography or time affords us a psychic respite during which we can regroup. And this type of distance is often a blessed sanctuary, too.

In the end, as novelist Zora Neale Huston writes: [a] thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it. Historically, there have been so many mighty big things that neither time nor distance have shrunk. Even today, we experience them through the printed page and testimony, in video and in film. Their impact is not lost on us. And much as we’d like to think that the world has finally matured into a civilized adult, there continue to be so many mighty big things that time and distance cannot shrink.

Perhaps the best we can do is to bear witness to those big things we’ve experienced directly and to listen well to others who bear witness to those we haven’t. We can also check ourselves on the solutions we offer, often from a distance that should call our proposals into question and subject them to scrutiny. Finally, we can pray that there will be fewer and fewer of these mighty big things and that when they do occur, we will respond with more than virtue at a distance.