Healing Through Caring
The late English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge tells in his book Something Beautiful for God (1971:91-92) about a conversation he once had with Mother Teresa about what her community tries to offer the dying on the streets of Calcutta. She replied: "We want to make them feel that they are wanted, we want them to know that there are people who really love them, who really want them….It is not very often things they need. What they need much more is what we offer them. In these twenty years of work amongst the people, I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience. Nowadays we have found medicine for leprosy and lepers can be cured. There’s medicine for TB and consumptives can be cured. For all kinds of diseases there are medicines and cures. But for being unwanted, except there are willing hands to serve and there’s a loving heart to love, I don’t think this terrible disease can ever be cured."
Did we get that? Mother Teresa said: “…it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.” And it isn’t just the poor and dying on the streets of Calcutta that are afflicted with this disease. We find it in the affluent homes and cities in our country, and often in the places we frequent – our schools, our streets, churches, clubs, stores, our homes, and the list goes on. Maybe we ourselves have felt that way and hoped desperately that someone would reach out to us and help us to know that we were loved and wanted.
As followers of Jesus we are called to care and comfort those around us. The word comfort means “strength or strong together.” But all too often we stay to ourselves or our own. “It doesn’t concern me” is a common response. Sometimes it is because we are afraid; sometimes it is because we are too focused on other things – school, work, building a family, doing church, playing, that we don’t feel we have the time to reach out. But when we take the risk: to listen, feel, reach out and be compassionate, to suffer together with the other, when we care enough to face the loneliness and pain of another, we are not only fulfilling the call of Christ to love as he loved, we also find something new within ourselves. Henri Nouwen wrote: “Comfort is the great gift that creates community. Those who come together in mutual vulnerability are bound together by a new strength that makes them into one body.” This is the church, this is the Body of Christ – people who come together in mutual vulnerability – “vulnerability”, because they come together in caring, comforting, healing, risking love. In their coming together in their vulnerability, they are bound together by a new strength.
So many churches measure their success in how many people are filling the pews, how great their worship is, or how big their budget is. But the real measure of success among the people of God is how much do we really love and care. The church is to be a place of healing – healing through caring.
All of us need, and I hope find, people who make us feel wanted and also help us become people who make others feel wanted, friends who love, people who create an atmosphere of warmth and genuine trust which enables us and others to love in return.
I think Mother Teresa was right: “…except there are willing hands to serve and there’s a loving heart to love, I don’t think this terrible disease can ever be cured.” Are you and I becoming those hands and hearts to the people around us? Because, unless we are, this disease will continue to claim the lives of people who are crying out for help. Maybe we can start with those in our families or in our classes or at our work. But wherever we start, we need to reach out.
