Help the Suffering
Written by Gary E. Smith Saturday, 05 January 2008 17:00
A Sermon in Honor of our Guest, Rosa Anaya
“Go out into the world,” we say to each other each Sunday. These benediction words have their origin in a letter Jesus’ apostle Paul wrote from Rome to the Christians in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, in a place then called Thessalonia:
“We appeal to you, brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you… Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil with evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing; give thanks in all circumstances… Test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every evil.”
We’ve used our own variation on these words for years, they have traveled to other congregations with our interns when they leave, they have spread around the country as I’ve used them at ministers’ conferences. They are a challenge, a reminder of duty, some instructions on how to live outside these walls: “Have courage,” we say. “Hold on to what is good. Honor all beings.” This is outer-directed. We’ll try hard. One of you told me you see this list as a buffet line. “I’ll take a little of this, and a little of that.” This is the pep talk we give each other just before we leave.
All of this, all of these words about our benediction, are prologue to some few words about just one of these lines, the words about suffering, what it is, and how we help others who suffer. “Help the suffering,” we say to each other, and I was drawn to those particular words in our benediction this week as I anticipated the presence here of our guest, Rosa Anaya, and of the plans First Parish has to organize a mission trip to El Salvador next spring, a year from now, for our eighth and ninth graders.
“Help the suffering,” we say, and I was drawn to Rosa’s story, the story of her father Herbert, director of the Human Rights Commission in El Salvador, assassinated there in October of 1987. “What would become of us who are left behind on the road of life,” Rosa says, always in memory of her father, if we didn’t have examples so impossible to ignore, examples that won’t let us forget the human capacity for love over the overwhelming capacity for destruction and oblivion?”
“Help the suffering,” we say, and I am thinking now of Oscar Romero, shot in the back there in El Salvador, a priest offering mass, shot in church, a martyr, too, like Herbert. Rosa says that there are so many names that “no monument in the world could sustain them.” “Help the suffering,” we say, and I am thinking of our own country’s careless and failed policies in El Salvador and our nation’s complicity in the injustice and suffering and poverty found there.
I have a metaphor to lift out of a previous “help the suffering” sermon, a story I found long ago in a book called THE PATIENT’S ORDEAL by William May, a medical ethicist. He tells of the time he visited the Caswell Center in Kinston, North Carolina, a facility for severely and profoundly developmentally-delayed adult men. He wants to experience as fully as he can the feeling of being institutionalized, so he asks to be assigned to sleep in one of the residence halls. He doesn’t get much rest, he says. In the morning, he and his two colleagues leave for breakfast. Now the story in his words:
“Squads of residents were in the hallway. I shook hands with a person who offered his hand; but, as I passed I realized that a number of other men offered their hands, and I , in the momentum of walking out with my colleagues, a little late for breakfast, shook hands with only the one, as though he were the deputy for the rest. I regretted that incident as much as any in the course of my visit. I should have stayed and [shaken] hands with them all.”
Please hold this image in mind, these outstretched hands, unshaken. They are this week’s sermon metaphor as we here at First Parish anticipate a connection with Rosa and with the needs of the people of El Salvador. In this image of unshaken hands is something very close to what it means when we say to one another here, week after week: “help the suffering.” How can we be present to those who suffer, how can we see ourselves in their place, how can we keep from hurrying on?
The sociologist Arthur Frank says that there are two very different and distinct understandings of what it might mean to “help the suffering.” Remember the men, stretching out their hands for William May, that man late for breakfast. One understanding, Frank says, “would be to look down the corridor and see a need to do something: build a new wing, change the staff ratio, introduce new treatment techniques,” any of which might help. But, he says, all those changes would come to nothing unless they are somehow “grounded in [our own] willingness to behave differently.” And this is what William May meant when he said he wished he had shaken ALL the hands. That’s the second understanding of what it means to help, not doing, but being, not looking past the outstretched hands to solutions, but taking each hand and lowering our eyes into someone else’s eyes.
I am thinking that this is what Jim and Margie and Faith and all the rest who will be planning this trip to El Salvador will be grounded in, this balance between doing and being. When our young people in the past have gone to Arizona to help on the native American reservation, when they’ve been in Washington, D.C. helping in a homeless shelter, when our young people go to Transylvania on work trips, there have always been things to do: paint a fence, haul dirt, tile a roof, cut firewood, teach children, the first definition of what it means to help the suffering.
But it is all for naught if there is not a piece of “being” in there with the “doing”, how are we transformed, how do we engage, how do we remain present, how do we not hurry on? This is what William May meant when he said he wished he had shaken ALL the hands, not doing, but being, not looking past the outstretched hands to solutions, but taking each hand and lowering our eyes into someone else’s eyes.
“Help the suffering,” we say. I am assuming that the word “suffering” needs no definition. Most of us, young and old, have known what it is to suffer: disappointments, losses, pain, grief. It’s all there in degrees: the way we suffer within our families when something is not right, and then out in circles: the suffering of hungry children, the suffering of war and devastation. There’s suffering in the house next door to you, there’s suffering in the pew just behind you, there is suffering in Rosa’s story, there is the suffering of the Salvadoran people. We never know what lies beneath.
The suffering part, we get; near us, we experience it emotionally, sometimes with our whole being. The farther out suffering is, it becomes more intellectual. We know it’s present. We know it lies around the corner. But it’s the verb “help”, as in “help the suffering” that sometimes confounds us. How can we help? What do we do? We know it’s easier to write a check or paint a room than it is to linger a little longer and shake each and every hand. In reflecting on this, William May thinks that suffering “resembles a mystery more than a puzzle.” This is a lesson I have been learning all my life.
When someone comes in to talk with me about a medical diagnosis, or a broken relationship, or the loss of a job, the first inclination I often have is to solve their problem. I make suffering a puzzle. “If you would only do this and then that, maybe you would feel better,” I am tempted to say before I stop myself. But I always do better if I just listen and let people tell their story, resisting all the temptations to cut off the conversation by imposing my solutions upon them. “Suffering resembles a mystery more than a puzzle,” William May says, and we know this is true.
It was T. S. Eliot who once said that there are two types of problems in life. “One kind of problem,” he said, “provokes the question, ‘What we going to do about it?’ The other kind poses the subtler question, ‘How will we behave toward it?’” Take the Anne Sexton poem that Jenny read earlier, one of my favorites. The poet is there “at the dock of the island called God,” she says, covered by blisters, “broke and healed, broke and healed.” If you wondered if she was suffering, this is how she describes her skin: “glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca,” no subtlety there.
And then God wants to play poker! What is happening?! God calls a wild card she did not hear and beats her unbeatable royal straight flush with five aces. God starts to laugh, she says, and then she laughs, “the fishy dock laughs, the sea laughs. The Island laughs. The Absurd laughs. Dearest dealer,” she concludes, “I, with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, that untamable, eternal, gut-driven HA-HA and lucky love.”
This is a poem of suffering and mystery and being present in the moment and being dealt a losing hand when you had thought all along that you were unbeatable. This is a poem of laughter at absurdity, an “eternal gut-driven HA-HA,” she says. “Help the suffering,” we say, and who knows what cards they are dealt or we are dealt, who knows what the wild card will be today or if we will hear it when it is called.
“Suffering does not pose a question,” William May says. “Suffering demands a response.” Why do I suffer? Why me? Why do others suffer? Why is there suffering at all? Prolonging the asking of these questions is not getting any closer to this business of helping the suffering, William May says, Anne Sexton says, Rosa Anaya says. It is the response that is demanded: shaking all the hands, laughing with the fishy dock and the sea and the island.
Who knows what mysteries and miracles lay in the connections we make? I am thinking of those things this community is doing: Jericho Road, certainly, and the Urban Ministry and the work in Cambodia and our relationships with our Transylvanian extended family and the Open Table downstairs. When I watch people preparing a meal on a Thursday afternoon, when I see how early people come to this building for a five o’clock meal and the setting up of tables and men hanging around outside and the women playing cards inside, who knows who is feeding and who is being fed.
In all that we do, miracles are waiting to happen, and if we can blend the helper and the helped into one, those who suffer and those who care into one, if we can make this true in one relationship after another, we will have lived into being the invitation to “help the suffering.” Rosa, it is an honor to have you with us. We will be saying our benediction with you and to you, and we hope you will always feel our embrace in the work you do.
Reading
The rowing endeth
I'm mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boats moored
at many different docks.
"It's okay," I say to myself,
with blisters that broke and healed
and broke and headed--saving
themselves over and over.
And salt sticking to my face and arms like
a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.
I empty myself from my wooden boat
and onto the flesh of The Island."On with it!" He says and thus
we squat on the rocks by the sea
and play--can it be true--a
game of poker.
He calls me.
I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
He wins because He holds five aces.A wild card had been announced
but I had not beard it
being in such a state of awe
when He took out the cards and dealt.
As he plunks down His five aces
and I sit grinning at my royal flush,
He starts to laugh,
the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth
and into mine,
and such laughter that He doubles right over me
laughing a Rejoice Chores at our two triumphs.
Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs
the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
The Absurd laughs.Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love yon so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.
--Anne Sexton
From The Awful Rowing Toward God. [C] 1975 by Loring Conant Jr., executor of the estate of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company All rights reserved.