I Came, I Saw, I Fled.

Veni, Vidi, Vici.  Julius Caesar said it in 47 BC. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”  He was reporting to the Senate his heroic victory over a particularly troublesome enemy of Rome.  What if Caesar, instead of coming, seeing, and conquering, had said, “I came, I saw, I got scared and fled!”   

In the story of the Good Samaritan, the hero has seen the man left beaten on the road.  And while seeing led Caesar to conquer, seeing led the Samaritan to help.  When we see someone in trouble, do we conquer our fears to help, or do we flee?

Why did the Samaritan help?  A growing body of research suggests that we’re wired to feel compassion, that we have “mirror neurons” that nudge us across the synapse between seeing and helping, like a Jiminy Cricket that whispers in our ear, “Hey, Pinocchio, go help that guy!”  Fr. Howard Gray put it in another way.  He did it because it was human to help.

Over the past few postings, we’ve come to this point of seeing the person in trouble, somehow getting past the things that we do to shield ourselves from visual input.  We’ve attempted to shield ourselves because we’ve learned that when we see troubling things, we’re troubled, that whether we’re aware of “mirror neurons” or not, there is a feeling that emerges from within us, a voice that rises from within us; something within us is stirred up.  Like the Samaritan and the two who preceded him on that road, we’re on our way somewhere, and this guy is “in the way” of our going there.  Despite our best intentions of being preoccupied by our own thing, we have seen him, this man in trouble, and when we saw him, we began to feel his pain.

Freud said that we instinctively follow a pleasure-pain principle, that we seek pleasure and avoid pain.  Regardless of our feelings about Freud, we do have feelings about pain.  If I were to step on your toe, you would instinctively pull it away.  And when, because of mirror neurons or the milk of human kindness, I feel the pain of the man on the side of the road, I want the pain to stop.  I want his to stop so mine will.  I want to pull my stepped-on toe loose.  I’m on an emotional roll.  I’m going with the flow of feeling, but leaping that synapse to helping calls me to action and to thinking that speaks another language.  If there is a helping instinct, it needs to be stronger than the reasons that might hold us back.

Why do we flee rather than help, defeating what Fr. Gray would call this process of becoming more human?  In yesterday’s posting Daniel Goleman told about the experiment in which theology students on their way to prepare a sermon on the Parable of the Good Samaritan who were confronted with a person in need.  Lots of them didn’t help, and the main reason the researchers found was that they were in a hurry. 

We can relate to that, no?  One of the reasons we don’t help is because we are already committed to something else.  We don’t have the time to help.  But let’s flesh it in, literally.  This guy is lying here half dead.  I come close and see in his eyes a flaccid lack of response, and yet I sense that he knows I’m there, and I sense a silent plea.  But I don’t know what I’m doing.  I don’t know first aid.  I don’t know if this guy has A.I.D.S.  I might get sued.  My boss might fire me if I screw up the sales call I’m on. 

The more we look at the Good Samaritan story, the more we realize that this idea of being human is sometimes an uphill climb.  Or perhaps more accurately, helping is an uphill battle.  The victory that Caesar was crowing about? UNRV.com tells us “Despite their tenacity and the advantage of the initial advance, Pharnaces' forces were likely exhausted from the uphill fight. (Caesar held the high ground atop a hill.) Before long, their lines began to break and it was only a matter of time before the entire army was sent into a rout. Pharnaces managed to escape with some cavalry but his entire army was slaughtered or captured in the overwhelming Roman victory. Caesar claimed that the entire affair, including the rounding up of fleeing prisoners took no more than 4 hours. 

What are the reasons that we don’t follow our feeling that calls us to help?  Please share your stories in a comment.

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