In a sense I am thinking out loud. But it is more than that. I am attempting to process, to understand. By myself it is meaningless. It is only in connection with others that any of this makes any sense.
Many of you know that I spent several days last week in Wise, VA, volunteering at the Remote Area Medical / Missions of Mercy event. I wrote about it twice, on Friday and after I returned on Sunday. I have continued attempting to understand what this means, how it connects with other things that matter, at least to me.
I will try in this diary to make sense of it. I do not know if I will be successful. This is a first attempt to express something broader than I was able to do in either of those diaries.
And, at least for me, it is a matter of urgency, because it is an issue of basic morality, and of common humanity.
I am a political creature, and have been since before my adolescence, perhaps because both of my parents were politically active. I write here, and elsewhere, on matters of politics and policy. I have volunteered for candidates ranging from local office to the presidency. And I am first posting this at a site dedicated primarily to politics, to electing Democrats.
In a sense, what I experienced this weekend was a crisis. That is, it forced me to confront some very basic issues of what is really important to me.
I acknowledge that what matters to me is a product of my entire life, and may or may not connect with what matters to someone who may encounter these words. Thus there is more than a little arrogance in my choosing to share these words so publicly. And there is more than a little irony, because basically I am shy, almost painfully so. I really do not "fit" in most situations. Intellectually I can understand how things "work" and what I should "do" to fit in. And yet despite that I cannot. If I am to keep my sanity I must pursue a different path. A path that can at times be lonely, but which carries with it a certain solace, an understanding that there is rightness to it that justifies it, and thus there is no point in measuring the cost.
I am the product of an upper middle class upbringing. My father's father was an immigrant tailor in Utica, New York. My mother's grandfather came in with his parents in 1862, her mother left Poland with her father hidden in hay wagon in the midst of a mini-pogrom in Bialystok in the first decade of the 20th century. Both of my parents went to Cornell, where they first met, later to encounter one another while working in the Office of Price Administration during WWII. Having both lived through the Depression, they ensured that both my older sister and I had many opportunities to explore our abilities, to grow, to develop. We did not lack for food, for health care, for love, for clothes, for a roof over our heads, for opportunities to explore our various talents as far as we were willing to take them.
We both went to outstanding colleges, my sister to Sarah Lawrence, me to Haverford. We have both had opportunities to develop our abilities as far as we were willing to commit ourselves.
Along the way we learned that we could not merely think of ourselves. Our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, Great-Aunts, Great-Uncles, cousins, and the like insured that we thought more broadly than kith and kin.
I am now 63. There are parts of my past that my beloved Leaves on the Current wishes I would not share - broken relationships and marriages; troubled teenaged years and in my 20s, too many job and career changes, a restlessness that moved me from New York to Philadelphia to Washington, and a wandering through a variety of spiritual traditions.
Much of it seemed pointless, almost as if were I to stop, to rest, to remain in one frame, I would wither and die.
Until this weekend it was hard to make sense of it all, as often as I tried.
I wanted to make a difference, but that was arrogant and egotistical.
At times I wanted to be important, and in the opportunities I have had to develop relationships with people who had power wasted them, thinking too much of me and not enough of what I might help them understand.
Here I have sought recognition, wanting people to validate me through what I had written and posted.
But I was never quite comfortable. I have a good mind, but there are those brighter than me.
I write decently, but others do it better.
I was trying to justify my existence by seeking external validation.
I was wrong.
I have been blessed.
I am a very difficult person. Ask Leaves on the Current, who has put up with me now since Sept. 21, 1974,
This weekend I finally began to grasp that we face a moral crisis, as a nation, a society. I would say as individuals, but that is contrary to my understanding, to what I have begun to understand.
Today is July 28. In 2 weeks and 2 days the fourth gathering of this electronic community will officially commence in Pittsburgh. I am still not sure if I will come, although having a registration I am inclined to do so, even as I am not quite sure why.
I look at things like the Sunday worship service,the putting together of packages for the troops, and I see something that makes sense - an understanding of our connectedness, our attempts to go beyond the limits of our own fears and insecurities to find a common connection.
As I attempt to write this, I am reminded of what matters by a non-human. Cielito Midnight is the most recent of our five rescued felines. Leaves used to encounter him in a gas station in Southside Virginia where she would stop on her trips to and from libraries in NC where she was doing additional research to turn her dissertation into a book. Even if that book is never published (although I hope and expect that it will be), that she encountered this loving creature and brought him into our common lives is what really matters. I could describe him as a difficult creature, but he does not have a mean bone in him. And when I recognize that,and accept him for that, my own understanding of life is expanded in a way that it might not be otherwise.
You are entitled to enjoy the good things in your life. I am equally entitled. But we should never forget that there are those who lack even the basic things that we take for granted. At least for me, understanding that haunts me, leaves me unsettled, drives me to try to do SOMETHING about it.
This is not a matter of a specific health care policy, a specific program, even any particular political victory.
It is something radical - that is, in the sense of radix, the Latin word for root.
If my enjoyment of the good things to which I have access in my life blinds me to those who still suffer and lack, I diminish myself.
All of humankind is entitled - to what, you might ask? To basic respect, to dignity. Work has dignity. The ability to provide for those that one loves has dignity. The ability to care for oneself has dignity. And if one cannot, and needs the help of others, it should be in a fashion that respects the dignity of the one to whom we offer help.
I worked this weekend with a dentist from Richmond named Tom Cooke. He is a former president of the Virginia Dental Association. He was in charge of the triage area in which I served. I cannot think of an encounter he had with a patient where he did not start by affirming the humanity of the person before him. Some were people who had been careless about their health, perhaps even irresponsible in their previous actions and inactions. To Tom it did not matter. Before him was person in need. The most important thing was first to recognize the dignity of that person, who was far more than the dental condition that brought them to RAM Wise, which is why Tom encountered them.
I learned from that.
I learned that efficiency for its own sake is inhuman and destructive.
I learned that genuine care and respect for another human being is more important than the dental or medical services we could offer, even as I also recognized that our society perpetuates inequity.
It is far too easy to dismiss others for the choices they have made. After all, one does not have to smoke or chew tobacco, to drink 12 or more Mountain Dews a day, to drop out of school and thus have difficulty finding employment. All that is true, but here I remember an interchange from the Gospel, where Jesus is asked how many times one must forgive, 7, and his answer is 70 times 7.
If God is love, if God is all powerful, then no action by a human being can permanently and irrevocably remove himself from that love and the power of God to forgive. Whether or not you believe in God - and to me that question is almost irrelevant - if man is in the image and likeness of God, what we should understand is not the power, but the unlimited love, and forgive and encourage rather than to bifurcate and separate judgment from mercy.
"Abba, what do we do here in the desert?" That is the question that invokes the response most meaningful to me in reading the sayings of the Desert Fathers, the early Christian monastics in Egypt and Nitrea. The response is what is key:
"We fall, we pick ourselves up, we fall, we pick ourselves up, we fall, we pick ourselves up."
My recounting of the tale may not be word perfect, but I believe I convey the spirit of that tale.
It is why we should never despair about our own failures, and equally why we should be forgiving to those whom some would dismiss and ignore because we believe they should have known and done better, at least as we interpret it.
It is not merely the physical and emotional suffering I encountered in the people who sought care at Wise.
It is that I encountered something for which I do not have the words to describe. One who is broken, who by all rights should be beyond hope, who nevertheless clings to the belief that something healing can occur. In a sense, the people who came to Wise expressed an optimism that was without limit, that perhaps should not have been there. They came with hope - a hope that their suffering might be relieved, that their lives could somehow improve.
Hope. That was the message that drove our most recent national election. Here and elsewhere I read about our disappointments in the actions of the administration we helped put in office. I have participated in such expressions, about education, about the violations of civil liberties in the past administration and the apparent reluctance to hold maldoers to account. I acknowledge my disappointment.
But then I look at the people whose lives intersected mine in that triage tent. How petty some of my disappointments seem compared to what they have to bear, and yet they come in hope, in the belief that somehow those doctors, dentists, medical and dental assistants, and ordinary folks like me and some of the other volunteers, can make a difference for them.
And then it hits me. They have given me - and the doctors and dentists like Tom Cooke - a gift greater than any benefit we provide them. They honor us by their trust, their hope, their belief that we will not ignore them, we will do what we can.
Perhaps this does not make sense to you. Perhaps you might wonder why I am posting this at a site that is primarily political.
My involvement in politics is not for the the excitement of the competition, although I do not deny the psychic rewards that come from that level of participation.
I think of the words of John Adams about his own participation:
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
I have been able to study music, history, politics, philosophy, psychology, gardening, art history . . . I do not have to devote so much of my ability to mere survival, to struggling to provide food for my family, to camp out or live in my car for three-five days to get rotting teeth extracted.
I have been blessed. I therefore have a responsibility to spread the benefits of the blessings I have received.
There is nothing wrong if I decide to spend some money to take Leaves out for a good dinner, for a movie, for a quiet conversation with drinks and dessert. That is part of life, and I feel no guilt about that - provided that I do not put a wall up, to protect that at the expense of understanding my responsibility for the wider society of which I am but a small part.
Love is not diminished by expansion, nor is it preserved by limiting its objects. Justin Martyr, an early Christian writer, described how spreading love is like lighting a second candle from the first - the first is not diminished and the light is increased.
My politics must be the politics of love and respect. It must seek to uplift, not to crush.
I am shy. I do not do this well. Which is precisely why I must go beyond my limitations, not hide behind the excuse of my shyness.
To open oneself up is to risk being hurt. It is also the only way one can truly find love and affirmation.
To close oneself off, to seek to control so that one does not "hurt" is to be in hell. At least for me, that is surely hell without end.
I do not seek to impose my understanding upon others. I cannot. You are not me. I can only express haltingly and in an incomplete and perhaps confusing fashion what I grasp "through a glass darkly" as Paul put it. I can only point in a direction I know I must follow.
And I can only find that direction as I seek to explain it to others, so that I am not trapped in my own mind, in the limitations of my own thoughts.
I asked to you to bear with me.
I now profusely thank those of you who have put up with me to this point. I thank those who will not read these final words, because they decided some time ago what I offered did not speak to them.
I always seek Peace. A peace that passes all understanding.
And as I complete this meditation, Lion-El Tiger, our senior rescued kitty, comes up on the sofa where I sit, rubs against me and the computer, and reminds me what true love is - something without judgment. He lies down near me, not against me, so that he invites, he does not impose - because when we offer love and care we must understand that the one to whom we present these is free not to accept our offer.
As you are free not to accept my words.
Peace.