I love Humanity; It's People I Can't Bear

Charles Schultz said it, or maybe it was Charley Brown.  The idea of compassion is easy.  One of the heroes in my life is my Uncle Joe, now 92.  As a boy I admired his ability to pursue his interests – rock collecting, tropical fish, music, photography, and reading, reading, reading of serious books.  Then he and my Aunt Arlene adopted a child, and their lives got busy.  His interests were put on hold until Joanie grew up and married.  Then Aunt Arlene’s dad died, and her mother moved in with them and they were busy again.  When she passed away, he retired and they moved to a little development in the high desert or Arizona, where he bought a little pickup truck and spent lots of time in the hills collecting and polishing stones.  The two of them would drive back to Chicago to visit from time to time, and I’d delight in the return of his freedom to pursue his interests.  Then Aunt Arlene was diagnosed with cancer, and he cared for her, his life absorbed in that role.

When Aunt Arlene died, I told their daughter Joanie that I hoped he would find some relief in her passing.  She lashed out angrily, “How could you say such a thing? My mother is dead and you think about relief?” Mea culpa.  Back when the Catholic Mass was in Latin, the congregation would read along with the priest, and in the first prayers at the foot of the altar, he would tap his breast three times while saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa….”  It meant though my fault, through my fault, through my terrible fault.  Now the youngsters have a simpler way to sat it: “My bad!”

The vehemence of Joanie’s rhetorical question burned the moment into my memory, or perhaps my soul.  It returns to me again and again, reminding me that my way of looking for the positive in things sometimes blinds me to the pain of others.  I had meant that I hoped the uncle I loved and admired could find consolation in knowing he had done all he could, had loved his wife through worse as well as better, sickness as well as health, and now awaken free to do the things that he enjoyed.   Joanie’s explosion told me it’s not that easy.  You don’t just turn the page and go on as you were.  Kathy’s friend Peg had calmly challenged my attempt to encourage her as she looks at an uncertain future in tough economic times.  I don’t remember what I’d said, but I remember her reply.  “That’s facile, John.”  There’s more to it than that.

It’s easy to love and not touch, whatever that kind of love is at all.  The idea of love is facile, easy.  It’s like imagining good times around the corner, or the idea of losing weight, or controlling an addiction.  It’s the doing that challenges us, the doing of love and compassion that puts us in a place where our ears are more important than our mouths, our understanding more than our ideas, our waiting more than our charging ahead.  If I recast the story of the Good Samaritan, perhaps the first person seeing the man beaten and left in the road would be not a Rabbi, but a guy saying, “Well, now he doesn’t have to worry about getting where he was going.”  The second might be not a lawyer, but another guy saying “Don’t worry, buddy, somebody is sure to come by soon who knows how to handle this.” 

God, why do I see myself playing those roles?  I’d rather be the third guy, who says nothing, whose love does the talking.  Charles Schultz knew what Bonhoeffer knew.  Talk’s cheap, like cheap grace.  Rilke knew.  In his Book of Hours he wrote (I, 14)

You see, I want a lot,
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as thought untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet,
it's not too late to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

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