Resilience and Costly Grace

My friend Peg called it “facile”, something I said to encourage her, something about the love of God or the resilience of the human spirit.  She was right.  It was too easy.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer might say that it was too cheap.

We have the term “a cheap shot”, meaning hitting someone when they don’t expect it, delivering a blow in such a way to minimize getting hit back.  We remain on the outside, out of danger. 

Hitler’s annexation of Austria, dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and invasion of Poland were done with facility. It was a “cheap shot” that started World War II.   After making a “look the other way” treaty with Soviet Union’s Stalin, he was free to use overpowering force.  With the German people continuing to suffer economic depression in soup lines, he created a scapegoat in the Jews, and the churches agreed to look the other way. 

While the leaders of Christian churches bought freedom to preach about the relationship between their members and their God, a bright young scholar was becoming certain that Christianity was about participating in the sufferings of God in the world.  It was about being in the middle of the mess with others.  It is too easy to say the inspiring word, tell the good story from the safety of churches whose thick walls muffle the sound of breaking glass and the smell of burning synagogues.  Bonhoeffer called that “cheap grace”, to dole out the good news from an endless store of forgiveness without repentance.  To be a Christian, he countered, was to know the cross from being on it with the suffering in the world. 

It was “Costly Grace” that Deitrich Bonhoeffer called Christians to, not averting our eyes or staying in the safety bought from Hitler by a handshake.  He was driven by this truth to establish a seminary to train priests in this kind of church, and it was his work of preaching this kind of truth that led to his imprisonment and hanging.

I spoke of Peg’s calling my comment facile.  And I used the word resilient to describe the generous store of human talent in each of us, calling it the human spirit.  I think that what I meant was that Peg would be OK, that she had within her all that she needed, an endless store of sustenance without substance.

I think of our friends Bill and Billie, whose walls are thin, whose tiny house is filled with neighbors whose hopes are woven from each others’ lives, whose windows frame views of community gardens growing between burned-out houses.  Their life teaches me that resilience, like religion, is really found only in relationship.  It is amid the wreckage of the world that we find grace, in the company of those who plant in soil enriched by sacrifice, who nurture what they have planted and share what results. 

And yet there remains in most of us the temptation to look the other way, to stay in our safe churches and homes, to survive on cheap grace at the expense of feeling much of anything, to dispense facile encouragement devoid of generosity.

Tomorrow – Johannes and his spirals

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Sight and Insight

Sonja sees hearts everywhere.  At least she did when she was just five, before her birthday.  She would stop her romping on the beach mid-stride and collapse onto the strand of little stones and shells that line that was both water and land, where the back-and forth of the waves had deposited these artifacts that some of us, most of us, thought was just stuff that stuck between your toes, ending up on the carpet in the car.  She would put her face close to the shiny wet little things and with tiny wet fingers precision implements would extract something and run to me, smiling.  She would place the something in my hand, and say “Look, Bapa, it’s a heart.”   This went on for some months, her finding hearts everywhere.  They were in the lines on the bark of a tree, or in the way the winter snow melted around a leaf, or on the stem of a fork.  If it was something she could pick up, a stone perhaps, she would, and she’d give it to her mom or her dad or her sister, or if we were lucky enough to be around, she’d give it to Kathy, or to me.  I would look at it with her, she looking at my face waiting for me to see it, see the heart-shapedness of it, and raise my eyebrows in real or feigned discovery, and purse my lips into an “oooooooooooooooooo” and let the sound come out, and then she would be satisfied and go running off to resume her play.  I had seen it . . . too.

As months went on, I had to stretch my imagination to discover the heart-shapes in the things she would put into my hand.  There were times she would give me two or three tiny “hearts” over the span of an afternoon visit.  I would take them out of my pocket when I got home and look at them again, without her smiling eyes  watching for my reaction.  I would shake my head “no” and deposit them on the little pile on the shelf above my desk, smiling at her imagination, the sweetness of her seeing hearts everywhere. 

She was slipping, I thought.  The ones from the spring, exposed on her driveway by the melting snow, were recognizable as heart-shaped, all right.  But as time had gone on, these summer heart-stones were becoming more and more indistinguishable from plain, ordinary ones, the kind we walk on, the ones that roll under our shoes, or crunch under our tires, or hurt our bare feet. 

Yesterday, Kathy and I went to a film, a little piece by the Irish Film Board called “His and Hers”.  I’d seen it in the long list of films that fill this week of the Traverse City Film Festival, the list that Kathy had implored that I look at, to tell her which films I’d like to see, so we could decide if there were any we’d find worth the $19 price of a pair of tickets.  I marked it because it was from Ireland, the place that formed something in Kathy, turned her into a heart-shape that sometimes I see, but often I overlook.  The film turned out to be clips of the cinematographer recording comments of females talking about the males in their lives, from little girls talking about their fathers to adolescent girls talking about boys to young women talking about their lovers to middle age women talking about their husbands to old women talking about their deceased mates, and finally their sons. 

In all of the images of the film, the one that stuck with me was the blue-socked feet of the seventyish woman that found their way into the soft, worn, dull-black shoes that they had caressed as she spoke of her departed husband, the way her right big toe had so adeptly flipped up the tongue of the shoe, to gain entrance that I watched carefully when the left did the same.  The camera had zoomed in on her feet, her voice in the background.  Her words finished her reverie when her feet had finished homing themselves, had nestled in those soft shoes; the camera faded to black.

For a moment I had seen a heart where at other times I would have seen a stone.  The beauty of that heart was such that it remains in my memory, vivid, living, vital, like Sonja’s looking at my face, searching for signs of my recognizing what she sees, the heart shape in that stone, like Kathy turning back to look one more time at the scene that I am eager for some reason to put behind me and move on… the friends, or the sunset, or the rising moon.

As in these weeks on this blog I return again and again to the issue of empathy, of finding the energy to care, to help, to lift up and heal, I am reminded this morning of the power of seeing, of really seeing.  Sonja’s latest stones, the ones in which she saw hearts but I did not – spoke not of her becoming less discerning, but in seeing more deeply, finding the shape in everything that shapes her, that shapes her mother and her Nana.  As readers’ comments suggest that is not so simple, this compassionate helping, I wonder how much of our difficulty comes from losing insight, from ceasing to see the heart-shape in stones, and in old, swelling, blue-ankleted feet, and in faces turning back for another glance of beauty.

Tomorrow – “Cheap Grace” – Bonhoeffer’s read on compassion fatigue and indifference?

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God Lurks

Yesterday’s blog about Kathy Bush found me turning off the Road to Jericho from the Good Samaritan story and onto the Road to Emmaus and the story of being accompanied by the sacred.  I thought of a third road and another great story – the Road to Damascus and Paul being knocked off his horse.  It struck me that these three “road” stories have what Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point calls “stickiness” – the stories stay with us.  In every one of them, something significant happens while the main characters are on their way someplace, when they are occupied.  

The Road to Jericho from the Good Samaritan story was full of twists and turns, perilous at night because robbers could hide easily and ambush the traveler. 

The Road to Emmaus was along a ridge, an eight mile walk for the pair who was heading home from Jerusalem, lost in conversation about the rumor of a man raised from the dead, a rumor that excited these two, who had been disillusioned by the loss of this Jesus, who had seemed to be their Messiah.

The Road to Damascus was a journey of several days, so Saul had some time to think.  Maybe that had something to do with is being knocked off his horse, giving us forever that phrase describing our being turned around and changed forever by some event, taken forever from the path we had been on, our momentum diverted forever.

Where were all of these travelers, these busy people, traveling from?  Jerusalem – which has been translated “The Rain of Peace” 

Sometimes it seems that God lurks.  My friend Ken just retired from our university after his own 40 years there, just a year after I did.  Friends all that time, we have children (and grandchildren) of similar ages, and at similar distances.  With time now, Ken has joined Facebook so he can keep up with his kids.  One of his daughters wrote to him and called him a “lurker”; she told him that’s the name given to “friends” who just look, and never participate.  He explained that he didn’t want to insert himself in their lives, just wanted to know how things were going.  And so now once in awhile Ken writes something, or whatever you call somebody stepping into the light on Facebook.

And some think God has retired, too, and hung up the Savior Suit, the Creator Cape, staying a simply soaring spirit, above it all.  But these stories seem to suggest that he meets us all along the way, on whatever way we take, however we workaholics attempt to leave the Rain of Peace behind us, our eyes on whatever horizon of elixir or escape.  This “Road Series” seems to suggest that God Lurks, and from time to time lies before us, or falls into stride with us, or, if necessary, even knocks us off our horse.  

For me, the aneurism that led to my starting this blog was my Damascus Road experience.  But it has been almost a year now, and my heart seems to be fine, and I can’t say that I remain as “converted” as Paul. As we look at the process of becoming more human by looking at the Jericho Road experience of the Samaritan, perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider how we are also taught by those who accompany us, who fall into step with us and break bread with us.  And perhaps it would be worth stopping to recall times in our lives when we have been knocked from our horse. 

Please stop and think or your experiences on these roads, and share your stories in “Comments” below?   I’ll use them in the next few days’ postings.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Of Rabbits and Resurrection

I’m noticing a kind of resurrection for Kathy Bush.  In Two Men and a Woman Show Up in Heaven  a week ago, I unknowingly started a demonstration.  As this blog looks at the Good Samaritan story as Fr. Howard Gray’s model of see-feel-help-change-ing our way to becoming more human, it seems Kathy has been meeting us on the road, picking us up and teaching us about mirror neurons and endorphins and the multiplier effect of acts of kindness.  She is meeting us not on the perilous Jericho road, but on the mysterious road to Emmaus.

In countless ancient cultures, navels, volcanoes, and death are the portals between this visible, outer life and the inner one, the unseen and mysterious one.  And since we in the U.S. consider navel-gazing foolish and our volcanoes are few, death is perhaps our main window to the unknown.  So when we find out that someone like Kathy Bush had terminal cancer, that without us knowing she struggled through it and died, feelings arise in us.  We find ourselves on the threshold of that portal, and death looms larger in us, perhaps maybe it’s only because it’s closer.  We want, most of us, to step back from the precipice, but our knees are weak, and we stand there, immobilized by something inside us.  Or our failing sense of balance finds us sitting quickly down, our bodies suddenly mouthing the words our tongues cannot quite speak: “Oh, MY!”   We sit and think about Kathy and our mirror neurons begin flashing, slowing us down, dying us, perhaps, taking us to that place where she is - stilled, unable to be more than thought or spirit.

We’re told that acts of kindness set off endorphins, trigger gladness in not only the person performing the act and the person receiving the kindness, but also those observing it.  Neuroscience sees this, and tells us that our bodies crave kindness, grow healthier, heal faster, and are energized by kindness practiced, received, or even observed.  Kindness given or recieved by others comes to life in us.

The Emmaus story finds a couple of guys walking to the town by that name a few days after Jesus died.  The charismatic healer/preacher had had quite an impact on people.  These two were on the dusty, flat road surrounded by the local hills, but their minds walked along the precipice that borders life and death, feeling the vacuum in their living world that used to be occupied by Jesus.  And just then he appeared on the road with them, unrecognizable to them in their grief.  As they told this apparent stranger about the Jesus for whom they grieved, something rose in them.  When the stranger broke bread, the realized that it was him alive with them, alive in them; their “spirits stirred inside them”

Kathy Bush seems to be meeting us on the road, and just as the Samaritan met the fallen Jew, We find ourselves lifted by her.  My earlier blog mentioning her has given me the gift of hearing from a few of the many people who remember her as I do, and every one speaks of her goodness to them.  Like the travelers on the road to Emmaus, our spirits stir within us, and we are returned to those moments of kindness, and brought back to that human experience of connection in the good that Kathy did for us.

Kathy’s acts of kindness, random and intentional, are multiplying in our sharing here on the internet and in our conversations.  In the stirring of our spirits I think that there is an aspect of Resurrection.  Kathy Bush lives in us, or not at all, just as Christ does.  And we have the opportunity to invite both to accompany us on our journeys, and at our tables.  And we have the opportunity to be lifted by the stories we share, and nourished by the bread that we break along the way.  And perhaps others might observe us along the way, and feel mysteriously good inside as they wonder what it is that they sense in us.  And perhaps it will work like it does with rabbits.

  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Planting Hope

“I get drawn in. I see and I even feel. Then fear steps in to block the next step. I worry about getting sucked in to a situation that will demand too much of me.”  So said Sarah, commenting on When Helping Hurts or Haunts 

“Name the game and then go on to do what is needed.”  So said Bobbie, commenting on Broken Mirror Neurons 

“We cannot "help" or "change" folks. All we can do is be there as friend. We don't "feel good" when we realize that we are not "accomplishing anything," and that tends to slow us down. If we change our perspective, our goals, and function within "their expectations," set our sights on their level, then maybe we can be fed enough to keep at it. And maybe that can be good for them, too.”  So said Cousin Pat commenting on We Are Fam-ily  .

Sarah nailed my reluctance in living out the model of the Good Samaritan, despite my writing about it in this blog lately.  Pat and Bobbie offered worthy strategies for getting past it.  

Be there as friend.  Do what is needed.  Yesterday on our way home from Detroit we stopped to visit Bill and Billie Hickey in their new home in Brightmoor.  New home in Brightmoor…I’m stopped at my keyboard by the juxtaposition of new home and Brightmoor.  If you search for images of Brightmoor Detroit, you’ll get things like this:

But you’ll also get things like this; 

because the spaces between the notes are music, too.

Bill had commented on Notice!   “Sometimes I act on faith...and feel lousy, guilty, scared, uncertain. I wish your recent reflections would allow a little more room for those feelings.”  And so when Kathy and I left our hotel with our son Chris to return to our new home in Traverse City, our first stop was Brightmoor, where Bill and his wife Billie act on faith every day.  They were taking off their shoes, caked with dirt from “Gloryland” , the garden that they had helped establish at Gesu, the parish we shared with Bill for decades.  Bill piled us in their Honda hybrid and drove us “around the block” showing us the work that was being done between the houses.  Here’s an article on one: Brightmoor: Neighbors Sow Change in Detroit.  

Get drawn in.  Do what is needed.  Be there as friend.  Bill and Billie join Riet and Mark Schumack there.  I was blessed to know Mark at UDM, and had admired his quiet example of humanity in the footsteps on Jesus; yeah, that same Jesus who told us who our neighbor was by introducing us to the Good Samaritan.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Deaf to the Cry

“When a hungry baby cries, it does not cry black or white, (Muslim or Christian or Jew, documented or undocumented); it cries hunger.”  Kwaesi Mfume was participating in a conversation about race in today’s society.  His comment supported yesterday’s posting here about getting compassion being blocked by our differences from the person in need.  But I recognized in his statement a principle of compassionate response: we are more likely to help the innocent.  I reflected on that statement, listened to the cry, felt my response.  But as soon as I began to visualize the baby, I realized that I began to be distracted from pure compassion.  A chubby baby was not as deserving of my compassion than a skinny one.  Were subtle tones of my emotions changed by subtle tones of skin color?  I must admit that they may have been. 

On Tuesday evenings we sit at a table in the small but neat dining room at the shelter.  We’re taking Chutes and Ladders and turning it into a way of helping non-homeless people like me understand what the homeless go through.  C. is a brilliant, insightful, calm, logical woman who is homeless because of a disease that made it impossible for her to drive to work.  L. placidly knits while we wait to begin, her wisdom contained, quietly available as needed.  D. massages the fingers of his left hand with those of his right and then reverses hands, telling me about the pain that is emerging as the nerves reconnect in his hands, just as it had in his face.  He knows that his time in the shelter will end before the pain does.   As we begin to set the board out on the table, B. comes over. 

“What’ya doin'?”

C. replies: “We’re taking Chutes and Ladders and turning it into a homelessness game, so people who aren’t homeless can get to know what we go through every day.”  B. sits down.  The game is a kids’ game, simple to play.  You roll a die and move the number of spaces that the die shows.  If you land on a ladder, you get to advance quickly “up” toward the finish.  If you land on a chute, you slide backwards.  C. and L. and D. have been naming the chutes for bad things that happened to them, to others in the shelter, which led to their homelessness.  Death of the breadwinner is one of the bigger slides, taking the player halfway down the board.  Near the finish, Company bankrupt takes the person almost all the way to the bottom.  Loss of job leads to foreclosure, and you’re sleeping in your in in-laws’ basement with your wife and kids.  B. joins the others in labeling the smaller chutes, the ones that set you back.  “Drinkin’ again,” she says. C. shakes her head no and clarifies the cardinal rule of designing the game: nothing bad that happens can involve blame, like drinking or getting angry at work or getting there late. 

C. says “We gotta be sure that everything bad that happens is not the person’s fault, because if we include stupid stuff or even mistakes, the non-homeless player will just say homelessness is our own fault.”  B. chimes in, voice rising in pitch.  “Yeah, they think homeless people put themselves here.”  After three weeks, the game board is shaping up.  It hasn’t been hard to fill name all of the chutes on the board for bad things that happen to the innocent.  Three huge chutes that wander down the board and suck the player in each have numerous entrances, dumping the player way down toward the bottom.  Each has a major cause of homelessness: family, (death of a parent, divorce, new twins, etc.) health (catastrophic illness, no money for medication, car accident), finance (stocks crash, death of the breadwinner, rent is increased). 

The homeless are not all blameless.  Alcohol addiction is as common as mental illness.  Foolish decisions have put some here as well as just plain bad luck.   But when we invite non-homeless people to join C. and B. and L. and D. to play the game, we’ll have denied players even the smallest blame-handle to grab, to prevent us from hearing the cry that is not black or white, drinking or sober, wise or foolish, but homeless.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

We-Are-Fam-ily!

A man just came through the lobby in the hotel where we are staying near Detroit, where I am writing this blog in the early morning, having access to the internet.  I liked him.  That is, I felt a positive response to him, more positive than to the night clerk or the flight crews rolling their suitcases by or the kitchen staff next to me or even the three women who had been sitting at the end of the counter where I am typing now. 

Why did this particular man draw a positive response from me?  As we look together in this blog at why we help, and why we don’t, please take 12 minutes to watch this engaging video and then I’ll tell you about this woman, and how I’ve processed my preference.

Jeremy Rifkin says that we are “soft-wired for empathic distress”, that we feel others’ pain.  But he says that we have created certain “associations”, societies to which we belong, within which we communicate, relate, and within which we empathize.  It started, he says, with tribe.  Those outside the tribe were alien, which literally means other.  The aliens were, tribally speaking, competitive with us, competing for food in hunting-gathering survival needs.  Rifkin postulates that as communication stretched beyond shouting distance of the tribe, writing and reading distance stretched us beyond tribal affiliation to religious association, national identification, and so on. He suggests that our built-in empathy is focused within these associations.  We feel the pain and joy and excitement and dread of those who are like us, and not those who are alien.

I have been struggling with my own empathy and apathy, feeling and non-feeling, since Bill candidly shared his own lack of joy (no endorphins, baby!) sometimes when he helped.  I had been gathering momentum in my morning writing, feeling more and more comfortable with the idea that we help because it feels good, that if we pay attention while we’re helping that the good feeling that we find will keep us going, keep us helping, that we won’t burn out or give up.

The man who came through the lobby was part of the tribe with which I like to identify myself, or perhaps the religion.  He was on his way to the gym. And as I type that truth, I realize my filters, how I have not seen the others in the lobby, not paid attention to them as I did to that man.  Oh, I’ve seen them, but I have not considered them, not thought of them.  Rifkin presented this video to a group of people who try to motivate people beyond tribe, religion, and nation to support their causes, to donate to their nonprofit organizations.

Yesterday our family came together in the pool at this hotel to unwind after two long hard days wrapped up in the wake and funeral for our nephew.  We came from the oppressive heat of the day to the cool water, and I watched with Kathy as our kids and grandkids and a few other members of the family added and added and added to the joy and relief by jumping in and splashing and chasing and hooting and laughing and on and on and on for probably half an hour.  Their mirror neurons were flashing.  They were wrapped up in each other, an amoeba, a Gordian Knot of interwoven psyches, entwined feelings.  “We-are-fam-i-ly…my brothers and my sisters and me” one of our daughters came bopping by, singing the song that came to her mind.

What started this series of blog postings on empathy and response, “Consider Yourself Hugged”   was a series of comments that looked hard at the idea of embrace as a “right” response as I had suggested, and that in turn led me to invite consideration of the Story of the Good Samaritan.  

The story suggests, like Rifkin's hoped-for strategy, that everyone is a member of our tribe, our family, that our mirror neurons should fire equally for aliens.

I have a long way to go.  I’ll reflect on that in the gym.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Broken Mirror (Neurons)

Yesterday’s comments - thanks to Nikki and Anonymous – include these words of emotion that I’ve put in bold text. 

“I get drawn in. I see and I even feel. Then fear steps in to block the next step. I worry about getting sucked in to a situation that will demand too much of me.  Anonymous said...

As someone who is "conservative" I often find that I'm the "minority opinion." That used to bother me, but I really don't care any more.  God created ME and MY feelings. Jesus always seemed to have the "minority opinion." He felt so strongly about it, that it eventually ended His human life.

I had closed yesterday’s blog with this request:

Gray’s nice neat model is built on if-statements:

 If we see we will feel

And if we feel, we will help,

And if we help, we will work to change the injustice that causes the pain that we saw.

Is it our own blocks from seeing or feeling or helping that get in the way that create the ambivalence that Bill shares, and I experience too? 

Are some calls for help …unworthy of our help or otherwise inappropriate?  If it's a pain to help, what does it mean? The idea of enabling comes to mind, or calls that are beyond our capacity.  What do we do when we face this ambivalence, or even revulsion?

So Nikki is sometimes blocked by fear and anonymous by being conservative.  I can identify with both. 

A worthy project… When Kathy and I were first married and having kids, we found ourselves drawn into a community of people of faith living in our neighborhood in Detroit.  We met once a week for prayer and “fellowship” – which meant catching up with each other, learning what was happening in each other’s lives, how we were all doing.  If someone was having trouble, we’d help out.  We lived in this fabric of caring and response.  An older woman living alone needed to sell her house, and it was in need of painting.  All of the men got together and painted it.  For a week we drove over whenever we had free time, and laughter and stories flowed as smoothly as paint.  She sold her house and all of us grew closer together. 

But then there was another house…  The neighborhood, called the University District because it was bordered by the University of Detroit Mercy, was well planned, except for one vestigial two-block street of odd houses that pre-dated the university.  While the half-square mile included two square blocks of simple, neat two-flats like ours and flowed into grander homes with lead glass windows and slate roofs, there was that one street with  a hodge-podge of odd homes on irregularly spaced, shallow lots.  One of them was home of a woman in the community, young like Kathy and me, who had taken her turn hosting a weekly gathering of the women in the group, moms raising kids.  Kathy and the other women found this woman asking them to help her dig out – quite literally – from a house that had gotten out of control.  The place was what some of us would call a mess.  Things were piled everywhere. 

I was somewhere between Nikki and Anonymous in my response, afraid to start this huge project but, I admit (I don’t consider myself “conservative”) that the word unworthy was written all over the blinders I had put on.  I felt that this woman and her kids and her husband seemed to be able to ignore the mess, and so should we.  Either they were slobs or wise enough to look beyond all this clutter to enjoy life, but either way, I thought, it was their choice and not ours.  But the women did decide to get us involved, and I reluctantly agreed to join Kathy on the day we had agreed to meet there and take a look.  Bill’s comment in NOTICE!  the blog two days ago come to mind.  There were no endorphins involved in my case.  I felt revulsion, and not compassion.  I think that the women in the groups did decide to help out, but I stayed away.

So I want to set aside the purity and facility of the model tomorrow again and look at times it didn’t work for me, when my mirror neurons haven’t drawn me to compassion, when I was afraid, or conservative, when I saved myself from the frustration of helping that hurt. 

Consider watching these short videos with me.  How does this idea relate to your being moved beyond fear or judgment to helping? Please comment!

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

When Helping Hurts or Haunts

My friend Bill commented yesterday, giving yet more evidence that we are strung on the same heavenly guitar, that when he makes music, it resonates in me. 

John, sometimes I "love" helping and sometimes not. Sometimes I "know" it's the right thing to do, but that doesn't always mean that I "feel" good about it. Sometimes during the past few days' reflections, it seems to me like you've tried very hard to make it seem easy, almost biologically automatic, to do the right thing. I'm not so sure.
As I've heard it said, acting on faith means that we are aware that we are not absolutely right. And, truth told, there are few absolutely right or wrong activities that I engage in. Most are, to use an Ignatian term, a tossup between two goods. That really confuses me and my endorphins. Sometimes I act on faith...and feel lousy, guilty, scared, uncertain. I wish your recent reflections would allow a little more room for those feelings. They, too, accompany my doing of the right thing. Sometimes more often than not.

Bill 

Me too.  The music that resonates in me is the same dissonant chord that Bill sounded in his comment.  Sometimes this blog is a “head trip”, theory and ideas.  But the heart educates us, which means it draws out from us what is within. 

Catherine McAuley, when greeted by challenges to her “wasting” charity on those who were not really needy, replied that she’d rather help a hundred who had no need than fail to help one who was in fact needy.  She found a way to deal with her own apparent ambivalence, which means being pulled two ways, as she helped.  Perhaps that put her mind to rest as she helped, but I wonder.

Sometimes helping is an experience of flow, of timeless, harmonious, rightness.  But often it’s not, and as Bill says, maybe more often than not, we’re stuck with this bumpy ride, and endorphins and mirror neurons are as far away as Oz.

So I’d like to ask for your thoughts and experiences on this.  The theory suggests that our brains are wired for compassion, and Howard Gray says that grace leads us that way too, that

If we see we will feel

And if we feel, we will help,

And if we help, we will work to change the injustice that causes the pain that we saw.

Gray’s nice neat model is built on if-statements.  Is it our own blocks from seeing or feeling or helping that get in the way that create the ambivalence that Bill shares, and I experience too? 

Are some calls for help …unworthy of our help or otherwise inappropriate?  If it's a pain to help, what does it mean? The idea of enabling comes to mind, or calls that are beyond our capacity.  What do we do when we face this ambivalence, or even revulsion?

Comment please?  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

NOTICE!

Altruism is best practiced selfishly.

When I was growing up, my dad had posted a big sign on the door from our basement:

NOTICE!

Close this door behind you.

This means YOU!

He was fresh out of the army, and had that way of commanding attention.  Where have you seen a sign with a big, bold, uppercase NOTICE at the top, followed by some text?  I think of them on doors of closed businesses these days, official notices about the closing, the disposal of contents, perhaps the new location.  I think of driving past wooded areas in the country, seeing them on dozens of the trees facing the road, letting hunters know that hunting there is not allowed.  The signs say NOTICE because most of us usually don’t.  They try to grab our attention from wherever it is, to focus it on something important.

As we look at the Good Samaritan story and Howard Gray’s see-feel-help-change model of becoming more human, more ourselves, there is an almost ironic twist.  While we are helping someone else, it is awareness of how we ourselves feel that sustains us, encourages us.   University of Detroit Mercy is one of 28 Jesuit colleges in the U.S., and one of 18 in the tradition of the Sisters of Mercy.  The founders of the Jesuits and Mercys, Ignatius of Loyola and Catherine McAuley, began their work by helping others.  Ignatius,  the son of a wealthy Basque family in northern Spain, realized that he felt better with the poor than with the rich.  It took a broken leg to stop him so that he noticed.  For Catherine McAuley   it was the potato famine in Ireland; one could not fail to notice the starving women on the street, but Catherine noticed that it was the pain inside herself when she could not help that was her motivation to step out into the middle of it to help.

The scale of the impact of these two people who noticed their feelings might suggest that helping is not self-denial or self-sacrifice, but applied self-awareness.  Just as it is noticing how we feel when we see someone in difficulty that moves us to want to help, it is noticing how we felt while we helped that keeps us going.  In Look Away, Look Away, Look Away…we saw that aversion, looking away, was our common attempt to evade growing through helping.  We were afraid to look at the other.  But to sustain altruistic behavior, to be the kind of person who seems tireless in their helping, we need to look in too.  We need to step back and reflect on what is happening inside ourselves while we help. 

The teachers at UDM who require their students to do service in order to learn course material say again and again that “They go out there kicking and screaming; they hate the idea of having to do service off campus.  But by the end of the course, they’re so glad they did that many of them decide to keep doing it after the course is over.  They love it.”  It does feel good, doesn’t it . . . if we stop and think about it?  I found this snippet of wisdom on an old and untrackable discussion string when I looked for the connection between endorphins and altruism:

"Happiness" is a vague emotion, like love, not an objective, short-term, measurable one, like calm, contentment, or excitation. However, all states of happiness usually share in common a factor of endorphin release.

Endorphins are basically one of two basic mechanisms for "fitting" data in the brain-as-neural-net, with the other being pain: pain is the reinforcement mechanism that trains your neurons to not do that again, while endorphins tell your brain to do please do that again. People are "happy" (have endorphins) when they're doing things that their body encourages them to do. To be happy is simply to be one with your body's material desires (though note that your brain is part of your body, and it has material desires of its own, for things like friendship.)

Next time you help, notice what is happening inside you.  It keeps you going, keeps you helping like the endorphins that keep the runner running.  Our bodies know that we need to help, because it just feels right.  Our feelings are helping us know what it means to be human . . . if we NOTICE.

  

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Two Men and a Woman Show Up In Heaven...

…It’s no joke.

I heard the voice of Jesus say come unto me and rest

Lay down thy weary one lay down, thy head upon my breast

I came to Jesus as I was, weary and worn and sad

I found in him a resting place and he has made me glad.

Weary.  That’s the only word that came to me in this church song going through my head as I lie awake this early morning considering yesterday’s cohort at the pearly gates.  Yesterday morning I got an e-mail that had been sent to everyone at the university.  Kathy Bush had died.  When I went to Goodwill Inn to prepare to serve dinner to my homeless friends, I found out about Josh.  And late last night we got the call about Teddy. 

I thought of a “cohort”.  Blame the esoteric word (funny – esoteric means something understood by only a few insiders, an “inner circle”) on Kathy Bush’s work at UDM, where we would study the progress of groups of students who came in at the same time, tracking their progress toward graduation.  These students who came in together and shared the process were called “cohorts”.  I wanted to shake the technical word from my head as I began to write this blog about three hearts lost to us, two of them suddenly.  But then I looked it up and found that it was very good. 

Cohort comes from the Latin hortus meaning “Garden”; like the more common word horticulture.  So a cohort can be seen as people who are in a garden together.  Since I don’t know what heaven is I’ll accept this verdant vision, and tell you about these three neophyte gardeners.

Kathy Bush was, like me, a lifer at UDM.  She was one of those people who could walk a mile a minute to get from one task to another, but smile at you and look you in the eye and greet you as you passed and make you feel refreshed.  Maybe it was the smile, her own unique recipe of warmth and wit that reminded you of some joke she once told, and at the same time some kindness that she performed, each done with equal efficiency and then left to walk on its own as she went briskly on to the next thing.  But there was this way of hers, that change in her face when you were in trouble, or afraid, or maybe just lost a friend. Her cheerful/busy/wise guy face would soften into one of the world’s greatest nonverbal “poor baby’s” ever known.  She was all empathy, all eyes and ears.  She also had a B.S-O-Meter with batteries that never ran out, especially with students who mistook that poor baby face for gullibility, and tried to take her for a ride.  There in her office next to her semi-cluttered desk was a prie-dieu, better known as a “kneeler”, one of those things you see in a church in front of a statue and a bank of candles.  Kathy called it her “appealer kneeler”, for the use of students who choose to get on their knees instead of just getting off their butts, which is what she was really after.  This diminutive white woman was vexed by no one, including the non-diminutive, not-white, non-woman gifts to God called Basketball recruits who considered themselves above it all.   B.S. is B.S., and in Kathy’s office, when it came to appealer kneelers, one size fits all.

About a year ago, the word went out that Kathy had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, seen generally as a death sentence.  This happened at about the same time as I had been told that my heart had a dangerous and potentially fatal flaw, a bulge that could burst.  I had become acquainted with the idea of early death, prepared for it, accepted it in a way, even as I explored with my doctors how to evade it.  My prognosis became better and better with time, but in the calm early acceptance of it, I had called Kathy at home.  Newly diagnosed, between tests and the start of chemotherapy, she wanted me to know she was OK with the whole thing, that she saw her life as very good, though likely shorter than she had anticipated.  She considered herself very lucky to have spent her life at the university, and to have been taken as a patient at Detroit’s Karmanos Cancer Institute, where she’d have the best possible chance of getting through it.  Her only burden, she said, was the sadness her mother would go through.  “I’m not a mother” she said, “but I know that no mother should have to watch a child go through this.”  She closed our long-distance phone conversation as she did her history classes and her meeting presentations and discussions in her office.  She summarized.  “I’m fine with this, John. I want everybody to know that.”  My subsequent calls in the following months did not get through to Kathy, and I admit feeling some relief, able then to cling to that image of Kathy Bush, the fine with this Kathy Bush, feeling lucky, working the plan, no regrets, thankful for her life so well spent in such good company.

If I were St. Peter, I’d set her up with an office up there, maybe even an appealer kneeler.  Josh and Teddy are promising recruits that need some work.  They’re both tall; both have shaved heads and charisma, or what you might call “presence”.  They’re hard to ignore.  But they’re hard for me to know, too, looking at me with one-way eyes that seem impossible to penetrate.  So they end up as characters in the lives of some of us who shared their circle, characters who never seemed to come out of role, and we never got to find their dressing rooms, where we might see them as they really were.  Maybe even they didn’t know who they were, or never came to like who looked back at them from their make-up mirrors.  Josh took his life, just weeks after moving from the shelter into a place of his own.  Teddy’s heart stopped what he couldn’t, the endless uphill climb of a life that seemed never to level off.  It stopped while he was helping one of the many friends that were drawn to him, as so many were drawn to Josh. 

I don’t know what heaven is, but I see these two guys, two big guys with shaved heads.  They’re sitting on this stone garden bench, each of them regaling the other with stories of goofy things they did, concerts they went to, bosses that really sucked.  They’re waiting their turn with the new Intake Specialist, K. Bush, with that funny kneeler-thing next to her desk there among the phlox just coming into bloom.  Watch out, boys.   She’s tougher than her size might suggest.

But the curtains draw to a close on my celestial imagining, and my heart wilts for these three newly to heaven, arriving so weary, worn and sad.   And I rely completely on the God that is with them where I can’t see.  I rely completely on his breast, on the rest that they will, all three, find there in the garden of His love, there in His inner circle, inhabited not by the most noble, but the most weary.  May all of us here – Kathy’s mom, Josh’s friends, Teddy’s family – feel that same comfort.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.