Years ago, there was a woman in my community that I learned to love. She was in her late 50s, was short and overweight. Uneducated and slow of mind, she lived on small disability payments.
When she was young, various men wandered into her life, using her, getting her pregnant, and then abandoning her. She had several children but all of them had been placed in foster care when they were toddlers by the state. She wasn’t able to parent or take care of them properly.
Mary attended the church where I was the minister. I would often check on her during the week. Sometimes she would ask me to change a lightbulb she couldn’t reach, or explain a bill she had gotten in the mail.
In return, she would bake a loaf of bread and bring it to my wife and me and our baby son. She would walk across town to deliver it. Still, it was always warm and delicious.
Ostracized by most people she lived a quiet life in her tiny house, which she kept clean and welcoming. Knitting and baking bread were her joys. But loneliness was her closest companion.
There is song by the band, Radiohead, about a guy seeking love he couldn’t have. Some of the lines are these:
“You float like a feather
In a beautiful world
I wish I was special
You're so very special
But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doin' here?
I don't belong here”
There are people whose lives are so small and isolated they often feel they don’t belong. They live and age in solitude, without family or friends. Often they are individuals difficult to like or love. Addictions, disabilities, poverty, lack of education, an absence of social skills, mental illness, a history of abuse, they languish in needs unmet, desires unfulfilled, love lost.
They become invisible to us, or dismissed by us.
I’m guilty, too. I pass them on the corners of busy streets with their cardboard signs. Some, perhaps many of them, are frauds. And I justify my passing them by with that mental reasoning.
But the health of our humanity relies on the consistent exercise of our compassion.
In our day, with this infestation of anger and hatred, of elitism and arrogance, of demanding rights we have abused, we fail so utterly in being humane, approachable, tender and patient with others.
There have been ugly periods of history where humans have lost the humility of their own mortality and the brief beauty that life at its longest can be. The fall of the Roman Empire. The Catholic Inquisition. The American Civil War. The South African Apartheid.
These were barbaric times when the preciousness and reverence for the lives of others were replaced with cold indifference and cruel acts of inhumanity.
Today, we Americans face a crossroad in our brief history. Will we learn to see the Mary’s around us. Be human and compassionate. Revive the purpose of our hearts. Feel again the warmth of being gentle and loving to others not like us.
We have been inching along another way, dark and forbidden. If we keep going we will be lost in another history of casualties and catastrophe.
But if we turn back and take another road, the way of learning our lessons, the light will lead us. And we’ll find again the meaning of being human.
© 2021 Timothy Moody
Comments
Post a Comment