Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
Generosity and compassion are the sea in which we swim. Taken out of it, we drown.
We can remember watching a child trying to make things right for someone he or she loved by caressing or nursing or holding or reassuring that person. Perhaps we remember being that person. Perhaps we remember being that child.
Even though small and undeveloped, the child possessed a sense of power and an insight that allowed him or her to act. He or she knew what was right and knew that he or she was capable of doing it. The child could think of a way to intervene and did. Out of an intense desire to make things right, an effort was made.
Not all of the situations which that child –which any child– faced lent themselves to successful action. Sometimes the child was physically too weak or too small. Sometimes the situation was too confusing or too frightening. Sometimes the child was overpowered. Sometimes the child was lied to. Sometimes he or she was humiliated. Sometimes the help that the child offered was rejected in a hurtful way.
No child grows up without a diminishing sense of power and of self. It is not a law of nature, simply a limitation which we have not yet understood how to overcome in the rearing of our children. As we mature physically, we lose our grasp on the once profoundly held conviction that we are just the right one to handle the situation. Having suffered, often repeatedly, as a child from the slights and hurts of thwarted action and insulted intelligence, we cannot maintain our earlier confidence in our ability to judge and to respond.
Young people come to adulthood capable of more than at any time ever before in their lives yet with less sense that they are capable. We who are older remember those times in our lives. We could have done even greater things than we did. We knew, somehow, even then that we could, though almost everything and everyone around us told us that we could not.
A name has no power of its own. It cannot even maintain the integrity of its meaning over time. “Senior citizen” was a term introduced to replace “old people”; yet it became equally tinged with disrespect through time. Today, we often refer to our “elders,” a meaningful and highly respectful term, hoping that it will not suffer the same fate.
The power of a name comes from the belief that it invokes and the accretion of feelings which it carries. A “drunk” is supposed to be someone who is weak-willed and incorrigible. A “bum” is supposed to be someone who lives in self-imposed poverty and filth. A “nut” is supposed to be someone so emotionally unstable that it is alright to inject him or her with brain-destroying drugs.
The meaning of each of these names implies that the person is undeserving.
The meaning of each of these names includes the assumption that the person is beyond help.
The meaning of each of these names invites us to blame the person.
“Homeless,” “underclass,” “prostitute,” “welfare mother,” and “criminal” are other names.
When we were children, we were still beginners. We had beginners’ minds. We paid attention to everything around us or at least everything that we were allowed to pay attention to. We moved our bodies and used our minds to respond to the changing environment of lights, shapes, sounds, smells, and feels. We were thinking all the time, all the time investigating.
With our beginners’ minds, we still paid attention. Every new scene was a fresh start. We formed our own judgments. They were often good ones, too, and the resultant actions were sound. Our insight had not yet been limited by messages like: “You can never make friends with them.” Or “They are all alike.” Or “It is no use trying to help them.” Or “They’re no good.”
In our beginners’ minds there were no names. People were not yet “stupid,” “lazy,” “crazy,” “bad.” Nor were we. We had not put these names –and other even more vicious names– to people and, consequently, had not accepted limits to our power or barriers between ourselves and others. We were still ready to fight battles in which the adults around us had already surrendered. From their mouths issued commands such as, “Don’t go near that neighborhood” or “Don’t play with that family” which had the same finality as, “Don’t stick your finger in the electric outlet.”
Our judgments gradually became distorted by these adult imperatives. Our responses to the world became skewed by their warnings. Their words began to define others, confine us, and constrain our relationships. Their limits, set for us with the best of intentions, frustrated us, filled us with the same fear which caused them to set the limits, and made us relinquish some of our power over our lives.
The freshness of our minds and the soundness of our insights was frequently overruled by “expert opinion,” the adult in authority over us. In some areas, our judgment was systematically subjected to bad information. We were forced to cede growing areas of our lives to pre-established opinions. Our view of life became warped by being forced to distrust our own intelligence and deny our own experience. We gave up on ourselves and on our ability to make a difference. We intervened less often. We took initiative less easily.
We began to accept names in the place of reality. We were told that a friend’s father was a “drunk,” and we acquiesced. We no longer thought; we labelled him, and agreed to relegate him to a category. The name served notice that people had given up on him. He was a “drunk.” The name also served notice that it was alright not to feel bad about him. By naming his condition, we were no longer to blame; and, somehow, he was. If we were less generous, if we felt less compassion, if we were less loving-kind toward him, the name made it alright. It was alright not to grieve quite as much for our friend’s father and not to mourn quite so deeply the waste of this human being. After all, we had no power to help a “drunk.”
Even as a child, we noticed that our friend’s father was good in many, many ways, was strong, was even loving. We noticed that he was struggling with something that he could not overcome. We noticed that over large areas of his life he had almost everything in common with the other adults we knew and was hardly different at all. We noticed that he was as good and as decent as he knew how to be and that he had strength and kindness and wisdom about certain things that many other people did not have.
Every instinct told us not to just name him, “drunk.” Even as we conceded superficially to adult opinion on this matter, the larger part revolted.
The sea of generosity and compassion is always there. It is the sea of reality in which we live and breathe and have our being. It is the sea of beginners’ mind. It is the sea of no-name. No matter how many times we are thrown out onto the shore, we flail and flop our way back into it. It would suffocate us if we were stranded.
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