If I’m lucky – and I try to be lucky – I’m in the sauna at the JCC twice a week for five delicious minutes after my mile-swim. Most times I’m alone in the sauna. One day this past week Jimmy (I learned his name later) shared the space.

Have you been coming here long? Jimmy asked.

About thirty years, I answered, I used to swim three times a week in the early mornings before I went to work. And you?

About five or six years, Jimmy said, since I got laid off. I just showed up here one day and people were nice to me so I came back.

Jimmy’s words that people had been nice to him made me keenly aware of the two of us – of his nearly twice-my-size body, of his sweat-glistening black skin contrasting with my own paleness where sweat just was … without enthusiasm. Childhood memories of segregation in the 1940s when “whites” like me weren’t nice to ethnic minorities flooded me there in the Jewish Community Center.

Perhaps I should have acted on my feeling of sorrow the memories prompted, perhaps I should have apologized for the past.

I didn’t.

What I said is, I see that you have grey hair so I’d guess that sometime in your life you showed up somewhere and people weren’t nice to you.

That’s true, he smiled, but then I’ve done my share of not being nice, too.

We agreed that we were glad to have learned to behave with increasing care of others as we grew to our respective ages. We told each other our names after that confession.

Jimmy told me that since being laid off from work as a computer draftsman for thirteen years in a manufacturing plant he’s been employed in a group home for the mentally challenged. He cares for four residents – a woman in her twenties, and three men, one in his 20s, one in his 30s, and one in his 60s. Jimmy works overnight, but, sometimes, during the day he takes residents on outings or teaches them behavioral skills.

He shared that in the past one man in his care couldn’t see, nor hear, and spoke in garble. The man was confined to his bed, in need of total care from others.

Jimmy said, I often wondered how it was to be within all that darkness. It brings your mind around to God. You wonder “why” for that person, and you wonder why you’re so blessed. You think maybe there are blessings within all that darkness. But you don’t know. You hope so.

He fell silent. I was profoundly silent.

Silence made the heat of the sauna hotter, less bearable.

I certainly hope so, was all I could reply, softly. Solemnly. The words came from the depth of me, like prayer.

Then I added, Some people have burdens of which we have no comprehension. I thought my statement the “Amen” to our sauna communion.

But, as we shook hands in the space that had become too hot for body and soul, Jimmy added a benediction.

Jimmy said, If we meet each other … let us greet each other.

My sauna experience with Jimmy reminded me of philosopher Martin Buber‘s assertion: “All real living is meeting.”

As a young woman I had held my experience of meeting soul-to-soul with another person to be the real living of which Buber wrote. Meeting is sweet.

Then, in my middle-age a college professor broke apart my naïveté. The professor declared: Real living is in confrontation, not in washy-washy meeting. He raised his hands and smacked the flats of his palms together loudly as he made the statement. He explained that first we must come smack up against difference with another in order for there to be the possibility of meeting. We must con-front. We must face up to something, to someone(s). We must deal with it; we must deal with them.

So, over the years I’ve enlarged my understanding of Buber’s concept of “meeting” to incorporate confrontation – before, after, and through the middle of “meeting.” Confrontation of self and confrontation of other. Confrontation makes the sweetness of meeting possible.

Martin Buber wrote an entire volume, I and Thou, on the reality.

Jimmy spoke the reality in one line: If we meet  .. let us greet.