Evoking Our Humanity

It all started with Katrina, this awareness of the power of images of human tragedy to arouse feeling.  

My work, blessed as I was, followed the cycle of academic semesters, the seasons of academe, the rhythm of student lives starting courses, pursuing them, finishing them.  And in the first weeks of the semesters, I would be invited into the classrooms of teachers who were convinced that their students would learn the course material better by doing what many of you did in this blog yesterday – by looking into the faces of people in difficulty.  But being in the Detroit, they had the opportunity to do as Cousin Pat did, not just to look at photos of faraway people, but to share time with those right under their noses, in shelters, warming centers, soup kitchens, and clinics. 

I had for three or four years used the Good Samaritan story to invite them into the learning model of see-feel-help-change, hoping to challenge them to become troubled enough to want to know why people suffer.  Bobbie expressed this troubledness so well: “What has to die in the spirit of a nation or a person to cause this agony?” At the end of each semester, I returned to those same classes to participate in reflections on the service, and how it impacted their learning.  I really had hopes in the model, and they were borne out by our research.  On average, students who did service were more engaged in learning and deepened their sense of justice and determination to live more justly.  But there were some classes that were painful to be in, because the students just didn’t seem to get it.  They seemed apathetic, which literally means unfeeling.  Yesterday’s blog was entitled “Seeing is Beginning” because as the commenters attested, seeing starts something inside us, even in three-year-olds.  While I was walking back to my office after one of these really disappointing classes with a Jesuit Volunteer who was helping me, I said to him “It doesn’t work if they don’t see.”

Time between semesters gave me time to reflect, to consider how I might do things differently.  The Christmas break after that apathetic class had been an unsettling one for me; I felt like the model was not working, and my enthusiasm was leaking out.  Then Katrina struck, and I looked helplessly at the images that CNN put on the television screen.  I ached.  I ached like I wanted the students to ache.  So I did with them what I did with you in yesterday’s blog.  I showed them photos of Katrina victims, eventually replacing them with many of those I posted for you.  And as Cousin Pat said, those photos were a kind of “practice” for them, so that when they saw the real people on their service projects, they would be able to react.

Father Gray’s model suggests that if we see, we will feel.  If.  And the commenters did see, and feelings did emerge.  In the classrooms those first weeks of each following semester, I would show the students the photos, and asked them what they saw, what literally caught their eye.  Bobbie’s eyes were caught by the hands, pushing, holding, turning away the pain.  And I asked them what they felt.  One young nursing student, when she described what happened inside her, said that the images evoked a certain feeling.  Her use of that word struck me.  Evoke means to arouse a voice.  Our silence can be silent no more.  We are stirred up, perturbed. 

Why don’t we see?  Feeling brings us to our feet, gives us voice.  It arouses our humanity.  But like the students, if we do not see, the model breaks down.  Think about it.  Share your comments.  What keeps us from noticing the trouble that people are in, not only those in floods or wars or disasters, but those in our neighborhoods, or in the crowds in our work, like in Anonymous’ remote broadcasts?  Why don’t we notice?

Tomorrow we’ll look at not seeing (no pun intended), and the next day I’ll share the story of a beautiful young student, the daughter of Polish immigrant parents, who wept because she saw, but she could not feel.

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