Bliss or Blisters? YOU Decide.

What keeps us from helping the person in trouble, even when we feel compassion for the person we see?  I’m watching for your comments to help me understand your reasons, but I’ll give you my biggest one while I wait for yours.  It’s a Good Story.

There were these two sisters, Martha and Mary.  A friend came to their house, and by the end of the day Martha was grousing about her sister, who had spent the whole darned day with their guest while Martha did all the cooking and serving.  On hearing Martha’s complaint the friend told her that her sister had chosen the better part, had done the one thing that was really necessary. Well, if I were Martha I’d be upset.  “Whaddyamean?!  If I’d done what my lazy-butt sister had done, we’d all be hungry!”  (The language is mine, not Martha’s.  Besides, she spoke Aramaic anyway.)  In fact every time I'd heard this story, I'd felt like Martha got kind of a raw deal.  “Aw, no fair!  Mary get’s the easy stuff.”

But the guest was Jesus, don’t you know – the Big G, the Son of the Father, the star of the Good Book.  And so for these years I’ve struggled with his apparent insensitivity, his ignorance of distributive justice, spreading the work out evenly.  “There is need of only one thing,” he had said.  I think what he was saying is presence.  Martha’s problem was being distracted by her resentment of the work that called to her sister, and that distraction deprived her of being present to the work that had called her.  In her distraction, Martha was not sustained by the joy of her work.

For me, a block to letting empathy nudge me across that synapse from feeling to helping is the subset of the human language that tells us to keep a safe distance . . . like the priest and the lawyer who passed the victim by in the Good Samaritan story.   When I was a kid, I could have alleviated our family’s near-poverty if a quarter fell out of the sky every time one of my parents said “Don’t get involved!”  With immigrant parents, I suspect they had learned to “mind your own business.”   More quarters from this adage would have taken us all the way to easy street!  What they meant was that if you start something, it will eventually exhaust you.  There is a term these days that bothers me because it sounds insipid and superficial: “Follow your bliss.”  But I suspect that others may make the same mistake I do, failing to understand what “bliss” means.  It comes from old German blithiz meaning gentle or kind.  Bliss is what takes us to the place where we are free to be kind.  Bliss calms us and frees us to take in what is around us and to be moved by it. 

Mary was following her bliss.  She was fed by that thing she was doing.  Martha was slaving away in the kitchen, blinded by resentment from the beauty of the food, distracted from the scents rising from the stove, or the joy of anticipation of how this would make her guest happy. 

How do we find sustainability in serving, so that we can open our eyes and admit into our souls the troubles of others, to allow ourselves to offer help without fear of exhaustion?  I believe that the Martha and Mary story offers a way: respond to needs by doing those things that make you gentle and kind, and remain aware of how they feed you. 

I have two requests for you, and as last week, I ask you to reply by comment.  First, what holds you back from acting on your compassionate urgings?  Second, how have you found yourself able to elude exhaustion and resentment?  You readers are a wealth of wisdom to me; please share with each other by commenting.  We need each other if we’re going to leap across this chasm between empathy and action . . . and meet not disillusionment but our own deeper humanity.

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