Grace means you don’t have to be deserving. You can screw up, break the rules, fall flat on your face, wear plaid, shoot, you can even get tattoos, and still be okay. Jesus was big on grace. So much so that to make sure we really got the point that he was eliminating all the religious rules and rituals and replacing them with grace, he voluntarily took the death penalty, to prevent any possibility of our having to be held accountable for anything. He piled up all the nitpicky rules and requirements that had ever been created, and satisfied them all forever with one final payment in full. Then he replaced all those rules with a “new commandment” that he said would be how people would know who his real followers were. The new commandment was “love one another as I have loved you.”

He didn’t leave any room for doubt as to what that meant, either. Jesus loved by serving. He spent the majority of his time on health care, actually. He healed sick people, mostly people who didn’t even deserve it. He also purposely sought out and befriended society’s outcasts; adulterers, crooked tax collectors, prostitutes, even the despised Samaritans (the ancient Jewish equivalent of illegal aliens). Incidentally, he didn’t do those things for people because they believed in him. Mostly people believed in him because he treated them like they actually mattered.

Any kid who’s ever been to Sunday School can tell you this stuff. It’s no secret how Jesus loved people; it’s in all the Bible stories. He did it by giving everything he had to give, with no strings attached. Who did he love? Everybody, of course. But most pointedly, he loved the people society said didn’t deserve it. The less than. The people who had made stupid choices and screwed up their lives, or had the misfortune of being born to the wrong families, or had chosen unsavory occupations. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to love those who least deserved it, those who were the most unlovable. And then he gave his life. In that act he demonstrated the ultimate extent of the new commandment he had given. He didn’t say “love one another as long as they deserve it but after you’ve made sure you can take care of yourself first and only if it’s not too hard for you.” He said “Love one another as I have loved you.” And he got down on his knees and washed smelly feet. He healed the sick, regardless of who they were, where they were from, or how they had lived their lives. He served, and loved, and held nothing in reserve; not even his own life.

That’s a hard act to follow. Some people are just downright hard to love. Some people totally don’t deserve to have anybody love them. Some people don’t even want to be loved. Maybe that’s why he made such a point of seeking out exactly those sorts of people to love, to underscore his intent, to make it crystal clear just what he meant when he exhorted his followers to do the same.

It’s real easy to talk about loving people, but it’s quite another thing to do it. So Christians have done what humans do when they are faced with a problem they can’t resolve, and taken refuge in a natural coping skill. We compartmentalize.

Compartmentalization is when we put things into different boxes in our brains. We can choose the boundaries of each box, and choose what sort of reality and expectations apply within those boundaries. Dividing things up like that simplifies things. Taken to extremes, it’s a coping skill that can become pathological. Children faced with a reality too terrifying to handle can sometimes compartmentalize themselves to such an extent that they create an entirely different persona in each box, each of them with their own subset of reality. This allows them to switch between personas based on which one’s reality and personality is best equipped to handle a given situation. It’s called dissociative identity disorder, otherwise known as “split personality.” It’s a protective strategy, and one we all use to some extent, just usually not to that extreme.

I find that Christians tend to build themselves a Sunday compartment. Since unlovable people don’t tend to show up at church on Sundays, they don’t have to exist in this box. Instead, we can just imagine all those people out there in the world who we’re supposed to love. They’re nameless, faceless people, preferably in far away places. It’s easy to imagine that we love them; we’re sure we would, if we knew them. Because in our imaginations they aren’t smelly or funny-looking or dishonest or undeserving. We can paint them as lovable in our imaginations, and then imagine ourselves loving them, and then to demonstrate our love, give money to someone closer to where they are, to use in serving them. It makes us feel benevolent and kind, and even Christ-like, and takes care of the whole “love one another” thing.

For the rest of the week, we move over into our day-to-day compartment, the one we’ve constructed for living in the real world. Since we’ve met the “love one another” requirement over there in the Sunday box, we don’t really have to worry about it too much in this box, other than to take credit for having accomplished it. In this compartment, real-world logic and values apply (you know, stuff Jesus didn’t have to deal with). The filthy ill-dressed man on the corner with a cardboard sign goes in this box. Unlike those imaginary people in faraway places, he’s not easy to love. For one thing, he smells bad. And what’s he doing on the corner asking for money instead of trying to get a job, like any responsible person would? Who does he think he is, asking for a free ride, and why should I give him money I’ve worked hard to earn, money I need to support myself and my own family? He needs to grow a backbone and work for it, like I have. In the day-to-day box, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and only the strong survive. It’s really too bad for those who can’t make it; it’s not that I don’t feel bad for them, but you know, that’s just how life is. I’ve got to make sure I can provide for me and mine; I can’t afford to jeopardize my family‘s security for people who can’t even pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Being in a health care profession has opened my eyes to a lot of things I was able to conveniently overlook before. Working in psych means the reality I’m trying to come to terms with is one of the bleakest and harshest of all. I can’t paint appealing mental pictures of imaginary people to imagine myself loving, make a gesture of generosity to demonstrate that love, and then go back to my comfortable life and forget they exist for the rest of the week. I work on Sundays now, so I can’t even successfully keep the boundaries distinct between my Sunday compartment and my day-to-day compartment. The easy-to-love imaginary people have all faded and gone kind of fuzzy around the edges, overshadowed by the hard-to-love real people who have crowded in. This has forced me to face what love, the way Jesus practiced it, really means. It’s hard. I’m not even sure it’s entirely humanly possible. But that word “commandment” really just doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room.

I guess I’ve made some progress. I know this because of the current health care debate. I see what my fellow Christians are saying, and am shocked and appalled that people who claim a spiritual belief system predicated on loving and serving their fellow man could be so openly heartless and uncaring. Especially since some of the ones saying the things that sound so harsh and calloused are people I love and respect. It’s jarring, and to tell you the truth, it’s got me wanting to build a whole new set of compartments to hide myself away in.

I am ashamed. I am ashamed that we’ve forgotten the truth. I am ashamed that we who have been so blessed can be so arrogant as to think, somehow, that it’s because we actually deserve to have better lives than those around us who are suffering. And I am ashamed because I remember when I have hidden inside my own Sunday box, selectively applying my beliefs to the world only where it wasn’t too painful and difficult, and turning a blind eye on the rest.

I recently read Matthew 25, for like the bazillionth time, and was stunned to realize that in all those previous times of reading it, I had never fully comprehended what it actually says. I guess that’s because the Sunday box tends to also serve as the Bible-reading box. With the walls of my Sunday box all falling apart the way they are now, some of the stuff Jesus said in the sermon he preached in that chapter has suddenly taken on new depths of meaning. His words show just how seriously he meant that command to love one another, and he describes quite plainly how we will end up being judged by whether we took it to heart:

Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed…For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me…I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” (Matthew 25:41-45, NIV)

Take a look. The single criterion that will ultimately determine whether we have accomplished what is expected of us as Christians is whether or not we have loved our fellow humans as Jesus loved us. Failure to do so seems to be the one thing that can finally render someone unlovable, too. “You who are cursed” is pretty harsh, from someone who can love even the most miserable of screwups. I find that pretty sobering.

John 14:6 is worth a look, too. That’s where Jesus said (KJV), “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but by me.” I was always taught that what Jesus meant there was that the only way to God was by believing in Jesus. But you know, believing’s easy. If that’s all he wanted, he could have just done a few miracles for a few deserving folk, and left out all the hard stuff like washing feet and loving publicans and sinners and Samaritans. Especially in light of how badly those things hurt his reputation with the religious folks. Shoot, if he’d have worked a little harder to keep his reputation clean, the priests and rabbis might even have accepted him as the Messiah.

But back to my point: I’m thinking now that Jesus expected a little more of us than just believing in his existence. He wanted us to strive to become what he represented — the embodiment of love, the servant of mankind. That’s why he went on, a few verses later, to specify that believing wasn’t the whole ballgame: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also…” That word “shall” indicates a requirement, not a suggestion. Ask any lawyer.

People are sick and dying. Not just people conveniently off in some far-away land we’ll never see. They’re dying right here, in our own country. In our own cities and towns. And we’re letting them, while we quibble heartlessly over just who deserves to be taken care of when they’re sick, and who, by golly, is NOT going to help pay for it. I am stunned at the shallowness of it all.

I was sick…and you did not look after me…
…I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.

What Would Jesus Do?

Jerry* was one of those. He had a mental illness that included psychotic symptoms, and was back in the hospital for a medication tune-up. He was very interested in the new medications the doctor wanted to try, and what their effects would be, so we were going over his medications together. One of them, naturally, was an antipsychotic. When I explained that it would help to diminish the voices, Jerry looked alarmed. “Oh, I don’t want the voices to go,” he told me. “It’s too lonely without them!”

I’m sure I seemed surprised, since that’s not how most of my patients feel about their voices. Jerry began to explain to me how, in the beginning, the voices had been horrible, nagging, taunting, threatening things; much more typical of the voices many psychotic patients experience. But Jerry had found a way to deal with them. “You have to get right with yourself,” he told me. “Every little thing you’ve ever said or done that you feel bad about, anything you don’t like about yourself, all the things that have happened to you that you still think about. Those are handles they can hold on to you with.” He talked about how he had searched out, one by one, every bit of the past he had been holding on to, and had worked through each thing in whatever way he needed to in order to finally come to terms with it, make peace, and let it go. He had dealt with his own flaws and shortcomings the same way, learning to accept himself in spite of them. “You have to just get over it,” he explained, “that way you get rid of all the handles for them to grab on to, and they can’t hurt you any more.”

But that hadn’t been the end of it, for Jerry. Once the voices had nothing left to taunt him with, they changed tactics and began to threaten him. “I was afraid all the time,” he told me. “They were always telling me horrible things they were going to do to me. It was a nightmare.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “But then I realized they never actually did anything. They just talked about it. So one day I had enough, and I sat down on the ground and told them, ‘Okay, if you’re going to do something to me, then do it! Right now!’” He waited for a long time, he said, but nothing happened, and so he knew the voices couldn’t really hurt him. After that he wasn’t afraid of them any more.

“So then they started changing,” he told me. “They would say things to help me, or to make me laugh. Now they’re like my friends. I’m okay with them, and they’re nice to me, and when they’re not there, it’s just…it’s so quiet, and lonely. I’m used to having them around now; I don’t want them to go away.”

We all have “voices” in our heads, audible or not…voices of self-criticism, doubt, guilt, and fear; voices of the people in our lives who have wounded us, hurtful things we save in our memories and replay over and over to make ourselves miserable. While for most of us the voices are silent and imaginary, for people like Jerry they are audible and real. Yet he was able, despite that much greater challenge, to come to terms with his own failings and learn to accept himself for who he was, to let go of the past and its hurts and failures, and choose to move forward. Once he had made peace with himself, he then faced and conquered his worst fears, even though they were much more tangible and real than most of us can even imagine.

I came away from that encounter both awed and humbled. For someone who is really pretty severely mentally ill, Jerry showed an amazing amount of insight, not to mention plain old common sense. Even those of us fortunate enough to have healthy brains and fairly normal lives could stand to learn a thing or two from him, I think.

* The patient’s name and other identifying details have been altered to protect their privacy.

What’s done is done.

There is no longer a choice of candidates before us – what’s before us now is a choice between sitting on our butts complaining to whoever will listen because our guy didn’t get elected and we don’t think the new guy is going to be any good, or rolling up our sleeves and finding a way to make America great again. I know what I choose. I’m not going to sit around waiting for a rude awakening — for me or anybody else. I’m not going to scrutinize the man’s every move for fault-finding opportunities. I’m certainly not going to hope something bad happens so I can say, “I told you so!”

I’m going to put my trust and faith in President Obama. I’m going to pray for him to make the right decisions as he moves forward. Since I firmly believe that every thought we think is a prayer, I’m also going to think positive thoughts toward him as he takes office and starts working for our country.

The United States of America wasn’t founded by complainers and fault-finders. It also wasn’t founded by perfect people who always did everything right and never made any mistakes. It was founded by doers, and by people who were willing to take what they had to work with, and do the best they could. And that’s the kind of American I want to be.

It was compassion that precipitated my journey toward a career in nursing, and like many of my peers, I had always felt I possessed a great capacity for empathy. That, however, was before I encountered Carlos (not his real name). He was a young man in his early 20s with elegant features and ivory skin that contrasted strikingly with his dark hair and piercing eyes. Carlos had acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, and its complications made him a frequent visitor to the hospital unit where I work. I paused to chat with him one night after checking his vital signs, and the conversation turned to cooking and food. He mentioned that he liked lemon juice and pepper on his salads instead of dressing, and I remarked that it sounded delicious and might be a good way for me to avoid the sodium in salad dressings. “Why are you avoiding sodium?” he asked. I explained that I have Ménière’s disease, and how reducing sodium in my diet helps me to avoid attacks of vertigo and keep my hearing for as long as possible. Carlo’s expression softened, and he looked at me compassionately, saying quietly, “Wow. That must be so hard for you.”

I was stunned. With just eight simple words, a dying patient had just completely transformed my comprehension of the meaning of empathy. Vertigo and hearing loss, no matter how pessimistically considered, can not begin to compare with the slow, agonizing death he knew he was facing. I have years, probably decades, of hearing ahead of me. I will not die from this disease. Carlos, only half my age, would not live to see another Christmas. Yet in the face of his own impending death, his body ravaged by infections he could not overcome, he was able to step outside his own misery, place himself into my reality, feel what I feel, and experience it as I do. It apparently did not occur to Carlos to consider how eminently more desirable my affliction was than his own.

I realized in that moment that I had barely even begun to comprehend the true meaning of empathy. I left his room that night feeling a sense of humiliation mixed with awe. It was easy for me to feel compassion for Carlos. I had never imagined, however, that it might be possible for Carlos to feel compassion for me.

“I just can’t imagine never [smoking|drinking] again!”

It got me to thinking about how we humans are so good at defeating ourselves by how we think about things. Forever is such a long, long time, and is so much more to deal with than we could possibly have the strength for right now. No wonder it’s so hard to stop those behaviors — we’re beaten before we even begin!

If you’re trying to change your life, use your strength for the tasks you have to accomplish today. Tomorrow is another day, and so are all the tomorrows after that. Deal with them when they get here. Trying to deal with imaginary future problems today is fruitless; it just uses up all of the energy that you could otherwise have used for getting through today.

Take smoking, for example. When you started smoking (if you smoke), did you spend any time thinking about how you would manage to keep smoking for the rest of your life? Did you think about how many millions of cigarettes it meant you would have to smoke, and mentally add up how many thousands of hours you would have to spend doing it? Did you worry about the staggering amounts of money you’d be spending on cigarettes, matches, lighters, air fresheners, breath mints, and smoker’s toothpaste, and how you would be able to afford it all?

Of course you didn’t. You didn’t think any long-ranging, overwhelming thoughts of what it would mean to you in terms of forever. You just smoked a cigarette. And then later you smoked another one. And in between, you did other stuff.

So quit smoking the same way. Don’t add up all the difficulties it’s going to create over your lifetime and fret about what an overwhelming total it all adds up to. Just don’t smoke the next cigarette. And when the time comes, don’t smoke the next one. And in between, do the in between stuff.

Forget forever. Just get through today. One step at a time, one day at a time.

He’s not an old man, barely middle-aged. He’s a homeless drunk, “frequent flier” on the hospital unit where I work as an aide. He’s admitted on a regular basis for various injuries and illnesses. Now he’s got cirrhosis and cancer and half his body is covered with cellulitis. His skin is yellow from liver failure and brown from living outdoors and red and oozing where the cellulitis has attacked; his teeth are rotten and falling out. Despite all that, however, he has the look of a man who was once athletic and ruggedly handsome. Beneath the dirt and grime, the silver streaks at his temples and in his beard look distinguished, and his eyes are intelligent and startlingly blue.

How does a person come to live this way? I’ve wondered that many times. In his case, it happened in an instant. One minute he was successful and happy, the next his world was shattered and everything that mattered in his life was destroyed.

He did nothing wrong; he was just driving down the road. With him were his parents, his wife, and his children. An 18-wheeler’s brakes failed; there was a crash, and he was the only survivor. Just like that, in the blink of an eye, everything he loved was gone. His body healed, but his soul was mangled beyond recovery. Now he’s a nameless drunk living on the streets, slowly committing suicide from the inside out. People probably look at him and roll their eyes and “tsk-tsk” at the shameful way he lives. More likely they don’t look at him at all. What they don’t understand is that they aren’t so different from him. They just haven’t had their lives run over by a truck. That doesn’t make them better; only luckier. Luck is not a matter of personal accomplishment, and does not justify pride.

I bathed him as carefully as I could, but still the pain was excruciating. Cellulitis hurts like hell, and he had it everywhere. He tried not to cry out, but it plainly hurt when I touched him. I kept apologizing, but each time he would say “you don’t have anything to be sorry for; you’re helping me.” There was no sense of entitlement or expectation. He was deeply grateful for every little thing.

The sum total of every difficult and painful experience I have ever endured doesn’t amount to even a fraction of what this man has been through. And yet although he’s given up on life and has pickled himself with booze to try to numb his pain, he’s not laying around moaning “poor me, pity me, care for me.” He smiles and thanks people for the most insignificant acts of kindness. He told me several times about the generosity of a pastor who allowed him to sleep on the porch of a church. All he did was let the guy sleep on the porch, but from the genuine gratitude in this man’s face and voice when he talks about it, you’d think he’d been provided with lavish accommodations. I feel strangely honored at having gotten to meet this man. Some would see him as just a no-good homeless drunk, and admittedly, he has given up on life and is eating out of other people’s garbage and drinking himself into a stupor while he waits to die. But somehow, in spite of everything, he is able to be genuinely thankful for things most of us just take for granted.

I wonder if I could find it in myself to be grateful for anything, in his place, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not so sure I could. I think that might just make him a better person than me. It’s a humbling thought.

I came away realizing that I don’t have the defective memory I’ve always thought I had. I’ve had this secret shameful fear that one day I would be the only eyewitness to a crime, and the whole case would depend on me, and they’d want me to describe the perp to a sketch artist and I’d be like, “Umm, he had a head, and a nose, and two eyes…” Then they’d take me to the lineup and show me a bunch of guys and I’d have no idea if I’d ever seen any of them before or not, and the bad guy would get off because I couldn’t identify him. It has haunted me. How come all these people on CSI and Special Victims can tell an artist exactly what shape someone’s nose was, and how their eyebrows tilted just so, and what kind of earlobes they had? I can’t even tell you what my husband’s earlobes look like, now that I think of it, and I’ve been looking at them for over a decade.

It turns out I’m a “spatializer,” not a “visualizer.” I’m not sure what the implications of this are, just yet. The research is still going on, funded by, of all people, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, courtesy of Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn, I suppose. As it turns out, Tibetan Buddhists are very interested in visualization, and whether you can teach a non-visualizer to visualize, and what the limits of the brain’s capacity for visualization are. And that the Dalai Lama, had he not been the Dalai Lama, would have liked to have been an engineer – so he’s very much into using scientific investigative techniques and properly designed experiments.

In the meantime, at least now I know I’m not broken — just different. Whew.

I’ve always understood this statement as a description. Recently, however, it occurred to me that perhaps I’ve been misinterpreting it all along. I’m thinking that it was actually meant as a definition. The word good, I’m thinking, may not be an adjective in this sentence. It might actually be a noun.

If good is an adjective, then when you look around you and see good things, you know they came from God. You look inside yourself and see goodness, and you know it is from God.

If you read it as a noun, however, making the statement into a definition, then the two words become interchangeable. God is good. Good is God. Good and God are the same thing. Synonyms.

If good is a noun, then when you look around you and see good things, you are seeing God. You look inside yourself and see goodness, and it is God. Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, every thought you think, everything you feel — all that is good is God.

Reading the statement the second way brings God into the here and now. Right where He should be. I like that.

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you.
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone may destroy overnight.
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it’s all between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.