Courage for Caregivers (eBook)

HENRI’S WISDOM ON CARE VERSUS CURE

A helpful starting point is Henri’s insistence that “care is distinctly different from cure.”1Henri believed that our care for the elderly helps to reveal this truth with singular clarity, because more than other age groups “the elderly confront us all with the fact that the concept of a final cure is an illusion.”2In a culture fixated on problem solving, we are often more interested in cure than care. Care professionals like doctors, psychologists, and social workers are trained to evaluate their competence by standard measures of successful treatment. Yet, Henri notes, “our altruistic intention to cure the ills of others has oriented us toward success in the eyes of others.”3Success tends to build a sense of power and prestige in those who can cure. While we are surely happy for effective treatment, the drive to cure may not always result in true care. “Many people have returned from a clinic cured but depersonalized” by aloof or arrogant professionals. It is a real but often unconscious temptation for care professionals to relate to their patients “as the powerful to the powerless, the knower to the ignorant.”4

In contrast to cure, Henri lifts up the beauty and value of authentic care:

Care is the context within which cure, where possible, may be received as gift. Yet, Henri assures us, when we cannot cure we can still care. It is always possible to say—through our presence, listening, words, or gestures—“I see your pain. I cannot take it away, but I won’t leave you alone.”6

SUFFERING AND COMPASSION

Henri helps us to embrace care for others as a way of participating in their suffering. Those of us with long experience in caregiving for family members will know two sides to this suffering: the difficulty, weakness, and pain of those who receive our care; and our struggle as caregivers to balance family expectations, work responsibilities, time constraints, limited energy, and perhaps sporadic efforts at self-care. There are seasons when we feel we are barely staying afloat on a sea of swirling changes and swelling demands.

Since suffering is a reality on both sides of the care relationship, one constructive thing we can do is to ask ourselves long-term questions like these:

• • How do I choose to face pain or distress with courage, hope, even curiosity?

• • How might I not only endure but embrace these circumstances?

• • What can I learn, here and now, that serves my growth in love?

As we engage our suffering and the suffering of others with courage, we discover growing compassion. Henri’s friend Parker Palmer likes to say that there are two ways a heart can break: It can be shattered into a thousand shards that explode and implode to wound others and oneself; or it can break open to receive more reality, insight, and love. A heart that breaks open under the pressure of suffering becomes more compassionate. Henri once wrote, “My true call is to look the suffering Jesus in the eyes and not be crushed by his pain, but to receive it in my heart and let it bear the fruit of compassion.7

The term compassion is rooted in the Latin pati (to bear or suffer) and cum (with). Compassion means “to bear with” or “suffer with.” It is closely connected with empathy which shares the Latin root pati, and signifies an ability to feel with the other. Yet while there is a strong impulse in our heart to feel with others, there is an equally powerful resistance to feeling too much! As Henri points out,

How many are the ways we recoil from physical and mental anguish! Suffering is a universal human experience from which no one escapes in this world. Yet no human experience raises so many profound and painful questions about the meaning and purpose of our earthly lives. Although we may ask such questions of people we hope are wiser than we, the real audience for our deepest questions is always God. Anguished questioning of God in relation to suffering is age-old, and never fully resolved by reason.

When we suffer greatly, painful questions fly from our hearts like flaming arrows: Why is this happening? What have I done to deserve this? Is God angry with me? Why doesn’t God heal me? Will God ever answer my prayers? We ask similar questions on behalf of those we love, especially when their suffering is hard to bear.

Behind our questions lie the eruption of difficult feelings: physical, mental, and emotional hurt; a deep sense of unfairness and consequent anger; sorrow and grief over loss; numbness and incomprehension; fear and uncertainty; helplessness and despair. Henri was deeply acquainted with these hard feelings. By example he encouraged us to be honest and realistic about them. As we explore the challenges of caregiving, we will look at stories that help us acknowledge and name our strong feelings of pain, fear, frustration, and exhaustion.

Yet Henri also keenly understood how faith sustains and strengthens us in our suffering. He assures us that before it is anything else, the mystery of salvation is this: God came to us in Jesus not to take our pains away but to share them with us. Through his passion he cried out alongside us in our agonies, our incomprehension, our loneliness and felt abandonment. He entered so fully into the human experience, and drank so deeply the bitter cup of our misery, that nothing of human suffering is now alien to God. All our suffering is held in God’s heart and embraced by divine love.

Jesus comes into human life revealing God’s humility (Philippians 2:5–8). In Jesus, God stoops to become small and weak with us in a manger birth. In Jesus, God welcomes the neglected, the feared, the despised, and the broken in a mission of compassionate transformation. In Jesus, God takes on our suffering and death in complete solidarity. Beyond his earthly life, Jesus invites us to share symbolically in his suffering every time we “eat this bread and drink this cup,” remembering his death and resurrection. Henri speaks of this cup:

Jesus never promises that we will escape our own suffering, but rather invites us to take up our cross and follow him. He asks if we can drink the cup he drinks, knowing we can only do so the same way he did—as “a deep spiritual yes to Abba, the lover of his wounded heart.”10 He assures us that he will be with us in our struggle to say yes—with us to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20), and even beyond what we perceive as the end of life: “I go to prepare a place for you. And . . . I will come again and take you to myself” (John 14:2–3). Jesus’ suffering was not the final word, and neither is ours. “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then...