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.