burnt-out ends
of smokey Advent days
Just some quick thoughts on violence, trauma, and awaiting a savior as soft as a baby.
Between 7 October and 3 December afternoon, at least 15,523 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, about 70 per cent of whom are said to be women and children. Many more are missing, presumably under the rubble, waiting rescue or recovery.
The appalling moral anxiousness of our age is an oblique recognition that the human being as such waits to hear something; and when we have collectively denied the possibility of hearing something from beyond our corporate culture, we expose ourselves to deep worries about our humanness.”
“Advent,” by Rowan Williams
There are two truths about human beings—one is that we are deeply the same, year after year, millennia after millennia. We are torn between two poles of the same passions—fear and love, envy and generosity, competition and cooperation—and the second truth is we have changed. Call them the law of the central nervous system—we are a creature made of strata of millennia—and the law of evolution: bit by bit, we grow into something new.
Reading Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, I am struck by the fact that we imagine that human well-being or even human nature, collectively experienced can remain unimpacted by the cataclysmic shifts of the twentieth century—by World War I, II, and Vietnam. That our psyches and social fabrics would be somehow immune to the collective terror of war.
Of course, we are not the same, after living through mustard gas, firebombings, napalm, and atomic war. Of course, we have all been seriously injured. Of course, the trauma suffered by one layer of humans has manifested itself in their children, every action has a reaction. And then, of course, the pain they absorbed into their small bodies is carried and transmitted in a new way to the next generation. And so here we all are, in a world scarred by original sin, transmitted down to us, and we are always picking up the pieces.
And I think that is what free will means. We can either be enmeshed in the cycle of pain, we can spend our lives reacting to the forces of terror that have plagued us, or we can act. We can act out of the deep wells of gentleness and kindness and love that exist in the deepest core of each human being, the small well of divinity birthed into us.
I have been thinking of this as my friend has been committed in a hospital for a seven-day mental health hold. Previously, I always felt like these were good opportunities we simply had to capitalize on to get her into the necessary housing and treatment. I think I felt that way until her—very sweet and well-meaning—caseworker told me that she was ineligible for the nursing home on offer anyways, since my friend did not have insurance and presumably could not pay out of pocket. Presumably, yes, if she could pay out of pocket she would be sleeping in a bed each night and not on the Red Line!
I would love to know in what world it makes sense for a woman who has been living on the street for 18 months and who has serious mental impediments to only be eligible for treatment or housing if her insurance paperwork is in order. One would imagine that the first two demographic buckets would make a strong case for why she is not insured. And one wonders why the hospital can’t just sign her up for Medicaid? One wonders if, perhaps, the system that we have created has large gaping holes in it that most people—perhaps the most expendable or expensive people, the most difficult ones—are designed to fall through.
And I have felt, as I have watched this all unfold from telephone calls, how cruel this system is, and, instead of trying to help someone in need, they have simply re-traumatized someone already very deeply traumatized by mental health care.
And I think systems often traumatize us, treating us with a calculated cold-heartedness instead of that belonging we are designed to—we have evolved to—expect from our community, from the human beings around us. I think this is why we are afraid of artificial intelligence, because the structure we have already set up for our lives is cruel and impersonal, and is often only liveable when you can make your way through the Captchas and forms and menu buttons to talk to a real person, voice-to-voice, if not face-to-face. Imagine (we’re all imagining it already) if you could never reach that human person, and instead, the whole robotic engine is controlled by robots?
When her caseworker tells me that my friend has no insurance and so is ineligible for housing: it doesn’t really matter, I think, whether or not I’m talking to a person or a robot. It is inhumane to send a homeless woman back out onto the streets of a December in Chicago. The system has made this person into a robot already. No artificial intelligence could act more heartlessly.
And I suppose it’s easy to blame the system, and I do, truly, more so than I blame this recent social work graduate who clearly cares and wants to make a difference, but is in the system, formed by it, working with it, so can only make the already pre-programmed choices. But I think that is the gift of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the gift of the saints.
It is actually possible, at all times and in all spaces to choose to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is possible to take personal responsibility for putting love into action. It is possible to love another person for the sake of the God who made you and me and our neighbor in their image and likeness. We live in a world, in a system, in a structure that keeps us trapped in this cold trauma of helplessness, of fear, of throwing up our hands in the face of market forces that shape our world. But we are, in fact, free to love, and have always been and always will be. It is the gentleness deep inside us—closer to us than we are to ourselves, deeper than all the wounds of the world, of past generations, of our own lives—that will save us.