Journal of Sacred Work

When you see injustice, give love. 
-Erie Chapman

   So often the world makes no sense. After a period of thanksgiving, rest, and freedom from want, we return to discover a world where injustice is far too common.

   Too many people suffer needlessly. Patients that should live, die. Those who should have enough money have too little. Patients in desperate need of organ transplants are too often denied insurance coverage and some of the critical health care they require. A child’s emergency may be a nurse’s everyday work. And there are other kinds of injustice.
   When inequity falls on the shoulders of anyone, it hurts everyone who cares.
      In the corner of an Emergency Department waiting room, a
forty-year-old
African-American mother of four waits for the care she needs. Her
breaths are labored.
She emits groans. She weighs nearly three hundred pounds. Like the
woman in the image (below,) she wears the universal face of suffering.
The admitting
clerk glances at her and turns away in disgust…

   "How can someone so poor be so fat?" She says to her co-worker.
   "It
must have taken a lot of food stamps," her fellow employee chuckles.
   They both laugh. The mother of four waits, groans her pain,
reaches for air, hopes her name is called soon.
   Love struggles to break
through but is blocked by the indifference of caregivers
who are underpaid, overwhelmed, and poorly led.
   There is a chance for kindness. Either of the ER workers in this hypothetical (but realistic to my experience) case could circle the desk, go to the groaning woman, express there sympathies, tell her help will be coming.
   Imagine that the groaning mother is rich and slender and European-American. Imagine that she is an executive who knows the system. How long would she wait? Would she wait at all? Perhaps. But more likely there would be little or no delay between her arrival and the initiation of treatment.
   So often, the world makes so little sense.
   Why must children suffer? Why
does evil triumph and hatred thrive and bitterness flourish when Love
is always there, ready to spread her cloak of kindness across the world
– if only someone’s humanity would invite her in?
   The first part of the serenity prayer is as far as some people get. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." But the second part is equally important: God grant me, "the courage to change the things that I can."
   We must change our broken health care system. Clearly, we can’t do this all by ourselves. Yet there is much that we can accomplish as individual care givers. We can find the courage to correct the things we can. Instead of standing by in the presence of injustice, we can speak up, we can act, we can offer to others the care we would like for ourselves. We can encouarage our partners to support each other in giving the gift of love – especially to those who seem "unlovable."
   In the wake of Thankgiving, can our gratitude for our own good fortune give birth to the courage to change things for the better? Can we use the blessings of strength we have been granted to help the weak and the suffering?
   In a world that so often makes so little sense, can we offer our own gifts love so that others will, at the end of the day, give thanks that we entered their presence, that we became, for them, the blessing they were seeking?
   A former colleague of mine used to ask: What is the most important thing you have done today? Sometimes, I like to ask myself, What have you done today to offer loving presence to another?
   We may live our lives shaking our heads at the world’s injustice. Or we may offer our own gifts to ease injustice whenever we see it. You may already be doing this, and experiencing the simultaneous gifts that giving love brings. Injustice is not born from anger, it is born from compassion – from seeing wrong fall another, feeling the pain of this wrong, and seeking to illuminate right. And righting wrongs is not always dreary and burdensome.
   David Whyte expresses the tone of truthful expression with the kind of exuberance I seek to offer to you – this day and everyday:

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

   In Thanksgiving’s wake, may we give birth to the great shout of joy waiting within.

-Erie Chapman