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Words, Deeds, and Motivation
It's one thing to read about social injustice and another to experience it. Those who experience it typically become marginalized and powerless. In the case of healthcare, the individuals and families of the sick, dying, and denied, are in no position to fight back against a system that even lawyers find too formidable to take on. In addition to the physical effects of treatment withheld, the psychological effects of being deliberately abandoned by those with the power to help are devastating. This personal devastation extends to our families, who must witness events at close range.
I am sure that for every mis-managed care incident that we've read about in the papers over the years, there are many more stories of denial and neglect that we never hear about. It is certain that only the toughest of the sick and the strongest of the families of the deceased are able to tell their stories. As far as I can tell, only the corporations themselves have access to the data that would support this "tip of the iceberg" theory. If they were ever to release such information, we can be absolutely certain that any data they handed over would support their professed concerns for patient health.
In my own case, the disease process happens to be relentless but slow. After ten years, I am a veteran of the abuses that our system of heath care allows. A mental toughness has set in.
More importantly, an inner strength eventually emerged greater than anything I would have thought possible. I believe that all of us have access to it. Be discouraged long and powerfully enough, but just don't quite let it break you, and in time discover a calm, courageous outrage against injustice that doesn't end. There is a courage deeper than the depths of discouragement. There is a great-heartedness that keeps us sane, holding our outrage quietly in its hands, still looking to do some good while we are here. There is a faith, one that we can find and feel first-hand, that provides a context broader than the terror of being abandoned and a perspective from out of which we can continue to see beyond our own problems.
And what I notice now is that around the world and in many different settings, indifference to the lives and the most basic interests of others is on the rise. Oddly, at the same time there has been a steady increase in talk about God and faith from political leaders and religious factions. In the U.S., politics and religion have become intertwined in a way that would have been unimaginable even a decade or so ago. Around the world we hear God and faith invoked by leaders who oppress other peoples, neglect their own, or urge them to mindless and reactionary hatred.
What does it mean to be a religious or spiritual person? The question interests me because I have a Masters in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago and one in Counseling from the University of New Hampshire. It more than interests me. For if we are not wise enough to discriminate the life of ego from the life of the spirit, our time is short.
Unless the world's people, and especially its leaders, begin to consciously care beyond the span of our own lifetimes, disorder and devastation will increase. Steadily increasing technological power with no increase in our powers of spiritual discrimination is a sure prescription for our early demise. Compared to the dinosaurs, we will have been a flash in the pan: brilliant but much briefer.
Like me, many Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual happen to come from a Christian background, even when we have come to question or reject those beliefs. It is therefore noteworthy that for all of today's overflowing God-talk and scripture-quoting, the most fundamental matter of what happened as related in the New Testament -- the front and center narrative of that good book - is consistently overlooked.
God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son. Jesus, in turn, willingly lived and died for this world's sake. He explicitly urged us to work while it is day, for the night comes when no one can work. And he exhorted us to be perfect as out Father in heaven is perfect.
Whether you conceive of it as God or as being or life itself, the reality on which our faith relies is infinitely deeper and broader than human works or human life. Each of us can experience this for ourselves, first-hand. And yet this greater reality that embraces our lives and works in turn seeks to be embraced by them. Moses, Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, and every great spiritual teacher, did not come into the world to give us complacency about our selfishness and urge us to bring on the Apocalypse prematurely. Where does it say: "You are saved. Therefore, do not bother with good works?" Every great spiritual teacher has invited us to follow in their path of caring for others and for the wider world in word, deed, and fact.
Religion is not a spectator sport. Authentic spirituality and genuine hypocrisy cross all sectarian and secular divisions. Many who call themselves religious have already been knocked spiritually unconscious by their egos. Many who deny being religious or spiritual demonstrate that in fact they are by how they lead their lives.
Until we begin to care first-hand for the wider world, the larger picture, and the future beyond our own lifetimes, injustice and unnecessary suffering will increase. For today there is one world -- technology has seen to it. And the children of this only world, who belong to all of us, will inherit the earth in the shape that we have left it.
