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.