Friday Night at 8: Caring from the Heart

I just finished reading a remarkable book, Heart Like Water by Joshua Clark, a memoir of his time spent in the French Quarter during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Josh experienced the storm, the days afterward with no electricity, finding other Quarter residents in various bars that stayed open the whole time, scrounging for food, exploring, dodging cops and soldiers who were driving around trying to enforce the evacuation.

He didn’t know as much as the rest of the nation what all too many folks were going through, at the Super Dome, the Convention Center, the 9th Ward, Plaquemines Parish — it wasn’t until later that he explored the Gulf Coast (including Mississippi), still dodging cops and soldiers, and saw the devastation.

And he wrote about it, in a wild stream of consciousness that sears the heart.

At the end of the book, Josh writes about apprehending the suffering of others.  He has been wandering the region, talking to people, hearing their stories.  But he senses something is missing:

… I look at the viscera of this place, the gray of predawn mixing with the gray of what was once a neighborhood to make everything once again like some dim reflection of a dream, and I want so badly to care, to ache, not from the head like we all do, but from the heart.  But I just can’t, no mater how hard I try, not now.

This is not an essay about New Orleans or Katrina.  It’s about human suffering and how we deal with it.

In our society, too often folks who suffer misfortune are shunned in one way or the other by the rest of us.

We may very well be kind people who wish to help, but often the sheer magnitude of human suffering we encounter makes us retreat from truly caring from the heart, from reaching out and connecting with those who are suffering when we are perhaps in better circumstances than they.

Well, Billie says it best:

Money, you got lots of friends

crowding round the door

When you’re gone and spending ends

They don’t come ’round no more

I’m not talking here about donning sackcloth and ashes and wailing and devoting one’s life to those who suffer.  Simple recognition, human witnessing, is difficult enough, I think.

We see politically how this plays out.  The Republican noise machine has called out the Welfare Queen as well as the undocumented worker to scare middle class folks into thinking their share of the pie will be cut smaller by people who don’t deserve help at all.  We see rich people being held to different moral standards, we see class warfare.

It’s easy to play on the fears of people, to make them turn against those who suffer with the subtle threat that they will be next if they try to really help.

And now, in our times, we are seeing suffering on a planetary scale.  Through our own advanced technology, we can know what is going on around the world, and it is not a happy sight.

And because we see this suffering so many steps removed, on TV screens or computer monitors, we can feel so overwhelmed that we never get around to caring from the heart and not the head.

I wrote last week about the challenge of staying human in these crazy times.

Caring from the heart is part of meeting that challenge.

We’ve been bamboozled far too long by powers that be who try to make us think we can’t do anything about this suffering, who are masters of rationalization and spin and who then confirm our own disconnect to our fellow human beings.  This diminishes us, makes us more isolated and cut off from our own humanity.

Why did Josh want to feel others’ suffering?  Why did he want to “ache?”  What was the motive driving him to this and why was it painful for him not to be able to feel what he wanted to feel?

When we connect with others, and I’m not talking about acts of charity or anything like that (which is not to say I don’t think that’s important), but just a real awareness of the fact others are suffering, we are the ones who gain something.  It may be painful to see that we are in a position of privilege and that privilege is paid for by the pains and hungers of other human beings, but I think it is far more painful in the long run to deny this reality and turn away with rationalizations, to care only from the head.

Because when we care from the heart, it transforms us.  We recognize folks who suffer as human beings just like us, we drop our pretensions that we are somehow exempt from, at the very least, witnessing this suffering.

One million Iraqis dead.  We can remember them, we can care from the heart.

Over 1,500 dead from the Federal Flood.  We can remember them, we can care from the heart.

The Sudan.

Burma.

Tibet.

All around the world.

No matter how much the powers that be try to tell us compassion is a limited resource, we know better, that there is no limit to the capacity of the human heart.

And when we connect in this way, we are better able to act as a brother or sister than some sort of removed observer, feeling guilt or blame, selfish sadness over our own inability to save the world which we then blame on those who are suffering, or shame that we can’t do more and so we do nothing at all.

When we connect, when we care from the heart, no one is a stranger, from the homeless man on the streets of Manhattan to the Iraqi refugee just trying to find a resting place.

This is not an easy thing to do.   Right-wing politicians and citizens love to hurl the phrase “bleeding heart liberal” at this reality like an incantation they believe will destroy what we all know is true.

They do this so they can continue to hide behind their shells of inhumanity, cut off from the very source of what makes us human, a hidden, shrieking part of themselves knowing just the same that this act has nothing at all to do with politics, even as those who master this ability often find themselves in the political arena in one way or the other.

All it takes is effort, awareness, and courage.

If we are to remain human beings during these crazy times, caring from the heart for those who suffer is an essential act and one worth taking the time to explore, to see for ourselves that this caring heart is already within us, full and complete, right there for the discovery.