Have You Heard the Call?
Rev. Kathleen Ellis
2 October 2005
How many UUs does it take to fix up a house? One hundred
sixteen yesterday, from the organizers to the smallest child wielding a
paintbrush. How many UUs does it take to run a church? Dozens of them will
tell you all about it at the Open House during coffee hour. From concrete tasks
to a ministry of presence to a ministry of music, all kinds of skills can be put
to work here.
The larger world calls out for attention as well. With the
terrible need for acts of compassion and helping hands following Hurricane
Katrina and now Rita, I have been thinking about all the ways we have answered
the calls for help. For a while most of us were glued to the TV or computer,
hardly able to believe our eyes about the size of the storms filling the Gulf of
Mexico, then the size of the disaster along the Gulf Coast in their wake. Some
of the images looked just like the ones we saw after the tsunami hit South Asia
on December 26.
For some of you, personal safety was paramount for you and
your immediate family, whether or not you decided to evacuate before one of the
storms. Second priority was to make contact with more distant family members.
It took me a week to find my niece and her family, and they were still in
Slidell. Nathan Ryan had 38 family members to locate. Some families have yet
to find all of their loved ones.
Now thousands of people find themselves in new cities where nothing is
familiar. You need directions to everything. You need a place to live, a
phone, a chance to retrieve anything salvageable, and maybe a chance to move
back home. We welcome you here for as long as you wish to stay. We’d like to
help you get your bearings.
At a Red Cross shelter last week, I met four members of a
family from New Orleans. One of them had spent three days at the Superdome,
waiting in line, sleeping in line for a bus. Her sister and brother-in-law had
spent days at the Convention Center. They still have nightmares about those
experiences, but they finally made their way to another sister’s house in Lake
Charles. By then the family had swelled to twenty in number. They managed to
evacuate again, by car to Cleveland, TX, where they abandoned their cars, and by
bus to Austin. They are exhausted, angry, and disoriented. Again they waited
for days for a bus back to somewhere—they’re not sure of the damage that awaits
them in Lake Charles.
A friend of mine in Conroe sent this short email:
Hello all - sorry, life has been hectic. No power, had a
tree take out my phone line, power line and cable, and pull meter box and
breaker box off the wall. That's fixed, if only the power would stay on. I
stuck a 2 inch, very rusty nail all the way into my foot. Had to go to ER -
tetanus shot made me very sick. Car wouldn't start. Refrigerator may be going
out. But I'm OK. I'll definitely be here this weekend but not sure my house
will be very hospitable if I don't have power. I'm sure we'll all be
communicating more later. Nancy
Five of us did get together Friday and Saturday for our
annual reunion of women’s shelter staff from the early years, and her foot is
swollen and totally black and blue. The nail had just been lying on her
sidewalk ready for her tender sole.
Most of us don’t have personal war stories—we didn’t even
get any rain here—just the hot, dry air. We got our fill of bad news through
the media and suddenly had to do something. A call went out for donations,
collected by Connie Gray and Jeff VanMeter as they made trips on our behalf.
Blankets, clothes, and medical supplies flew out of our closets and off store
shelves to meet the immediate need. Some of us worked at shelters; some
answered help lines; some collected toys for kids; some took in rescued pets.
In the longer term, there has been interest in adopting a
family on our own or in partnership with another church. The Southwest District
is also organizing multiple partners for the UU congregations in New Orleans and
Beaumont. If any of you would like to help with any of these projects, let me
or Chuck know.
Meanwhile, we have struggled to get our own lives back on
track. I have noticed that a lot of people have been distracted, unable to
concentrate, slower to get things done. We have experienced a persistent
sadness and a burning anger that so many things went wrong.
Social workers, nurses, disaster response teams, and many
more experience this kind of challenge on a regular basis. I remember when I
worked at a shelter for battered women and their children. I was a Resident
Advocate in the early years of the Montgomery County Women’s Center, when
shelter staff did virtually everything that came up during each 12-hour shift.
We got to know the women pretty well, especially if we were the ones who brought
her to the shelter and did the initial interview.
The first woman I personally admitted to the shelter
returned to her abusive partner within 24 hours. He had sent flowers to her at
work and promised to change his behavior, though he had been abusive throughout
their time together. I couldn’t sleep that night —kept my own husband awake
until 3AM as I talked and talked about what might have become of her. He held
me close and finally said to me, “Kathleen, it’s time to come home.”
My boss advised me the next day to leave my work in the
shelter at the end of my shift, in the capable hands of my partner. She said to
imagine a light switch that I could turn off as I went out the door. As a
matter of self-protection, I learned to do that much better over time. It has
been a very useful skill for almost 20 years.
How do we avoid “compassion fatigue”? How can we protect
ourselves from burnout? Well, from my own experience, first you have to
recognize that the work is never done. You have to trust that someone else will
pick up the next load and carry it a little further. You have to maintain your
own balance. Put on your own oxygen mask first before you assist someone else.
One useful book on this subject is How Can I Help? by Ram
Dass and Paul Gorman. They remind us that helping other people is a natural
impulse. If one arm is caught, it’s only natural to use the other arm to get it
out. We see someone suffering and it’s only natural to lend hand. Our own
suffering can be the impetus to reach out to someone else. We are all familiar
with suffering. We may not have had to look into the charred face of a child.
We may not have been a care giver for someone with Alzheimer’s. But all of us
have faced a situation when we could not have what we needed and situations when
we had to deal with something we did not want.
One concept I learned from Dass and Gorman is the value of
stepping outside ourselves and becoming a Witness. The Witness sees reality
without judging yourself or others.
Imagine that you live in a small village, but you go up the
mountain and watch yourself walking around, doing your thing, shopping, working,
taking a break. When you come back to the village, a part of you remembers that
outside perspective.
You’ve probably seen the show M*A*S*H. There they are in a
crazy-making Korean War with a bunch of crazy co-workers and villagers. Somehow
they have to find a way to function—wounded people are on their way, screaming
in pain. What to do, Hawkeye, chief medical officer? Survey the scene, like
any good hawkeye would do. Once you get an overview of what needs to be done,
concentrate on the job at hand, and have a party afterward. You have to lighten
up or you’ll go crazy, too.
As we become more accustomed to taking the stance of an
objective Witness, we experience a shift in perspective that understands the
suffering to which we respond and at the same time understands what we bring
with us in response—our intentions, our needs, and our expectations. We may
need to appear responsible, useful, powerful, important, moral, worthy, needed,
or caring. The Witness recognizes the needs on both sides, because helping is
not a one-way street.
One woman had a brain tumor that had to be removed to save
her life, but the surgery resulted in her blindness. She had an enormous
struggle in coming to terms with a new reality. She felt as helpless as she had
as a little girl, but finally she said to herself, “Well, here you are and
there’s no place to go. It’s time you brought a little help into your life.”
She made the best of rehabilitation and gradually discovered that she could be
of use again.
She said, “I met a young man [in rehab] who was blind from
birth. He had never had a birthday party. So I baked him a cake and organized
a party. He blew out the candles he couldn’t see. He was delirious. It was
grand. I felt so happy. I had come from that lost blind person on the corner
to someone who had seen a need and done something about it.”
Going further, she said, “Everyone is helpless, one way or
another, and everyone is helpful too. We’re all here for each other . . .
that’s how it is. And we all have something to give, no matter our condition.”[i]
Access to so much information today tends to overwhelm us
with the needs. Our society pays quite a bit to push suffering away. After all,
the poor live in other neighborhoods, the elderly in nursing homes, the mentally
ill on the streets, the dying in hospitals or hospice care. If they are in our
own families, we gather resources to assist. Otherwise, we focus on our own
bills to pay and mouths to feed.
This ability to isolate ourselves works temporarily, but
the problems out there in the world have a way of encroaching on our privacy.
They affect politics, public policy, tax rates, and education.
David Shipler, author of The Working Poor: Invisible in
America was interviewed on NPR the other day. He told the story of a boy with
asthma who was brought to a clinic over and over again for treatment. His
mother had to take time off from work whenever he got sick, and she was in
danger of losing her job. They lived in a leaky apartment whose landlord
ignored requests to make repairs. Mold and mildew made the asthma worse. A
nurse did a home visit and called the landlord. No response. Finally, a
lawyer, on the clinic staff for just such occasions, threatened legal action and
the problem was resolved. Poverty ensures a complex set of problems that are
interconnected. Clinics have to retain lawyers as well as medical personnel.
How can we as a congregation embrace one another through
life’s challenges? We can always help each other through what we do. We can be
Witnesses who see a hawk’s eye view rather than get tangled in exhausting
details. We can also remind one another that who we are, deep down, is the true
blessing we bring. We are, in the end, fellow travelers on a long and winding
journey.
Amen and Blessed Be
[i]
Ram Dass and Paul Gorman, How Can I Help? (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), pp. 144-145.
Copyright
©2006, Live Oak Unitarian Universalist Church.