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Compassion 101
Refresher course in reality
by Stephanie Piper
Five weeks ago, I left my job in academe to work for a non-profit organization that cares for the poor and homeless.
People react to this news in one of two ways. They look at me as if I have taken leave of my senses. Or they look at me with envy.
I alternate between bliss and reality overload. I have cup-runneth-over days, when I believe that my real life has just begun. And I have what-were-you-thinking days, when I cannot believe that I traded quiet white corridors for the Technicolor world I now inhabit.
I am not a social worker or a counselor. I’m here to help raise money. But it is impossible to be in this place and remain unmoved by its insistent rhythm of need and help. The baby wailing in the waiting room, the schizophrenic man who’s off his medication, the stranded traveler are all a few yards from my office door. Telling their stories is part of my job now, which means that learning their stories is part of my job now.
I thought I knew this world. I did, after all, spend six years in lower Manhattan. I volunteered at schools in Chicago’s worst slums. I took Compassion 101 a long time ago, and I thought I passed with flying colors.
That was then. In the 25 years that followed, my focus shifted. I became a journalist. I worked full time and ran a busy household. My newspaper closed, and I got a job in public relations. Every Christmas, I wrote checks to an old teacher of mine who runs a youth shelter in Harlem and some nuns who work with the poor in rural Mississippi.
I drove past the ragged men panhandling on Cumberland Avenue. I didn’t ignore them, exactly. Sometimes I gave them money. Sometimes I said to my children: There but for the grace of God. Sometimes I said to myself: That could be me.
But of course I didn’t believe it, not really. That could never be me, sleeping under a bridge, raving on street corners. I didn’t believe it was the luck of the draw. I had the secret notion that I had earned my middle-class life, that I was somehow entitled to live in a comfortable house, to eat when I’m hungry, to climb into a clean bed when I’m tired.
I did, after all, work hard. I paid my bills. I wrote those checks to charity. Each Sunday, I put the envelope in the collection basket. I cried at Save the Children ads on TV. I took Compassion 101 a long time ago, and I passed, didn’t I? That should be enough. That should keep me safe.
Now I begin to wonder. Today a man my age told me of his life: the military service, the honorable discharge, the good engineering job, the disabling injury, the menial job, the layoff, the downward spiral. Yesterday a woman with new teeth and a beautiful smile told me of her life: the cycle of mental illness and abuse, the two steps forward and three back. People look at me like I’m trash, she said. But I didn’t choose this.
Now I am haunted by a Flannery O’Connor story I read once, called “Revelation.” At the end, a right-living woman named Mrs. Turpin has a sort of vision. She sees a horde of people headed for heaven, traveling on a swinging bridge extended over a field of fire. All of humanity is on that bridge, the poor and the crazy, the halt and the lame, the noisy and the desperate. And in the back of the procession, she recognizes people just like herself, “who had always had a little of everything and the God-given sense to use it right. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
Compassion 101. I think I’ll repeat the course.
June 10, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 24
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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