Words travel. And by this I mean to say spoken words do not just fall upon someone’s ears, but they also change meanings and can become unrecognizable from their origin.
Thanks to my good brother in Christ, Bill Carroll, who gave to me a brief read entitled, “Out of Solitude” by Henri Nouwen, I re-read Nouwen’s short meditation on care. From time to time, it is necessary for good men and women to be reminded of the Gospel’s unadorned and foundational, unchanging truth. Nouwen provided me with a fine reminder of God’s traveled word and untraveled (unchanging) message in one word’s depth.
What does it mean to care? Because modern life desensitizes us to many things, Nouwen says care is more than not associated with a negative, as in, “I couldn’t care less.” It seems we are adept at not caring. But to care, in its origin, means to grieve, to feel sorrow and to shoulder weight from life’s burdens. Desensitized though we may be, there is much around us to care about. Just look.
Nouwen tells us to care means to be present with another and what follows from such a presence is sharing in another’s pain, focusing on another, absent concern for self. Care endeavors never to be sterile and desensitized, never to be an on-demand commodity, never to be insisted upon and not reciprocated, never to be bypassed for remedy. Care ceases to be when it is not shared or masked as expectation.
For me to say “I do not care” means I do not grieve or feel sorrow or wish to enter into my neighbor’s burden. But there’s more. God doesn’t ask me just to care for those who care for me. He instructs me to care for those who don’t. Hard isn’t it?
Too often, we focus on equality and misunderstand its meaning as equal in goodness. But how should we define equality? Answers weft through pain, sorrow, grief, and yes, our shared fallen nature.
There is a mutuality inherent to caring. By this I mean first, we are to care as Christ cared for all, to share in Christ’s heart, to see as Christ. This seems as an unreachable perfection. But also, we are to possess a willingness to be contrite enough in our own heart, to deny any pride that reaches first for cure, so we are able to remain present to God’s grace. Because we, too, have experienced pain and loneliness, in this mutuality we must ask, “Do we engender caring through our fallenness or goodness?”
But care moves, also. It moves us to community, a place where pride is no longer central to existence. It moves us past pain and grief, past the clamoring decibels of fear and self. Care tunes our hearts toward God, evidences His working in us and through us. And moving, we arrive where God wishes us to be.
“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 11:15, NKJV).