Measuring the Nard
A caregiver is a utilitarian without credentials He has an objective but no way to measure his progress in achieving it. If a caregiver cannot complete the task of caring how can she demonstrate her success? Whether he is caring for a person, society, himself, the environment, or God, care is not an objective that can be accomplished and finished. Although caring is generally recognized as a virtuous thing to do, it is a source of frustration for a goal-oriented society. That may be the reason that people lower the bar. Good people, without thinking about it very much, often limit the definition of care to giving money, dispensing medicine, filling a sandbag, or delivering a meal. Those are all good, wholesome things to do. They are marks of caring people benefiting the world around them. They are satisfying because they can be completed and celebrated. But those acts may limit our understanding of a care receiver to being a person who needs money, medicine, a dry basement, or chicken tetrazzini.
Care, at its deepest level, has a fanciful notion of the bottom line. In a world that measures the deepest needs of people with standardized school examinations, means-tested food stamps, and for-profit prisons we have confused measuring care with measuring the power of the caregiver. It has become difficult to think of care as anything other than the more powerful helping the less powerful: the healer strengthening the ill, the provider feeding the hungry, the legislator reforming welfare. It is accurate to think of power as being used to care for others, but the definitions of power and of care have suffered at the hands of those who feel that nothing is achieved until it can be measured.
A caregiver can measure the amount of money she gives. (The Internal Revenue Service absolutely insists upon it.) He can tally the number of shoes distributed and determine how many students were tutored this year compared to the year before. But she cannot measure the care receiver’s relationship with God. He cannot know about the development of the care receiver’s values and sense of meaning. Without an accurate measure of the caregiver’s achievement how can she establish her credentials? The depth of the caregiver’s journey cannot be understood with the usually accepted but inadequate definitions: of power and care, pretending to be practical but in truth are damaging; Power: The ability to direct events and resources to achieve a particular, predetermined, outcome; Care: To lessen suffering or pain.
On the premises of those two definitions caring people have justified ignoring a care receiver’s status as the image of God. Caring can become a shallow, temporary exercise for both the caregiver and the care receiver as a predetermined outcome (a meal, an inoculation) lessens the suffering from hunger or disease. Certainly lessening hunger and disease is to follow the call of Christ, but a care receiver is more. A more profound definition of care, a definition worth the subject matter, is: Care: To accompany a person into the presence of God.
There is nothing directive about that. We have no idea what kind of outcome will result from such an enterprise; the caregiver cannot guide it. The caregiver is travelling into unknown territory and is at least as vulnerable as the care receiver. When the goal is to be in the presence of God, the caregiver does not steer a person. Indeed, the care receiver is more likely to know the direction to take than the caregiver. The care receiver knows the barriers in the path; he has seen them before. The care receiver knows his own potential. The care receiver understands herself beyond being a measureable result. The caregiver is likely to limit his understanding of the care receiver’s needs to the things the caregiver can provide. A person of faith may have the courage to go into the unknowable presence of God with someone who needs a believing companion.
To accompany the more profound, less measurable, definition of care, consider the more profound, less measurable, definition of power.
Power: The ability to help a person understand, the purpose for which he or she was created.
With these definitions of care and power a person of faith is not limited in her ability to show God’s love. Caring can happen even when we perceive the object of care as being stronger than ourselves. We can care for the environment beyond extracting resources. We can care for ourselves beyond fulfilling our ambitions. We can care for others beyond safety and preservation and into lives lived as creatures of God. We can care for God who created us to love God.
Natural selection being what it is, we are genetically predisposed to think of care in terms of safety and helping the weak. Likewise, we think of the powerful as caring for the fragile–not vice versa. It can be difficult to imagine caring for an employer or a leader. Adolescents do not often think of caring for a parent or a teacher. There is a societal assumption that doctors and politicians are powerful and are to use their power to care for others. People may appreciate and admire the powerful, but they rarely think of caring for them.
PARENTS
It is common for a person to be confounded by trying to care for his offspring as the youngster proceeds from infancy through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood and to come to the realization that the son or daughter thinks of the parent as powerful. (The parent has possibly never felt powerful in her life.) The child perhaps alternately likes and dislikes the parent but rarely considers caring for the parent. The understanding of a care receiver as the weak one in a relationship precludes the notion of caring for a parent; the child was imprinted early on with the vision of the parent as dominant. It is at about this point that the parent is astounded to learn that his own parents have become old and now need care as well. The person has his own assumptions about the balance of power between parent and child, and she finds herself equally frustrated by the assumption that she is more powerful than her child and that her parents are more powerful than her. Both assumptions are wrong. They are based on the inadequate definitions of power and of caring. The power model is usually established when the child is pre-reasonable and then endures for the sake of convenience. Parents often mistake safety for care and view their more powerful role in the relationship as that of protector. To the degree that the protective parent encourages independence at all it may be to persuade the child to defend himself. On the other hand, if the parent thinks of care as accompanying the child into the presence of God and thinks of power as the ability to help a child see what he or she is created for, the parent will possibly encourage the child to seek out chances to serve, to explore values that the parent may not share, and for the child to make herself vulnerable.
As the adult cares for his own parents with integrity, it will be after he has abandoned the safety of assuming that his parents are in charge and exercise power over him. She will embrace the idea that power is deeper than control and will find security in joining her parents as they explore their relationship with God in their changed circumstances.
HEALTH CARE
Perhaps the medical profession is equated with caring more than any other; not coincidentally, it is also equated with power. Particularly for those who view physical health and safety as the greatest good, the relationship between medical professional and patient is unquestionably one of a powerful caregiver helping someone in need. The phrase “doctor’s orders” often ends a discussion without having to answer further questions.
On the national scene, health care legislation has been the source of a great deal of public anxiety. Polls repeatedly demonstrate that citizens support the individual provisions of the benefits of health care legislation, yet the worry generated by changing health care is a powerful political weapon. From the HIPAA-protected confidential relationship between an individual patient and an individual physician to the public rants on news outlets one point seems to be overlooked: that throughout history caring people have helped the ill understand the value of their lives
Individually and publicly we would benefit from a distinction between power and care. Medicine continues to expand its power to prolong a patient’s life but the breath-taking science has not contributed to an understanding of the purpose of the lives being prolonged. It is another case of power being mistaken for care. A caregiver knows the difference between keeping a patient comfortable, or even extending life on the one hand, and encouraging the patient to consider the value of his life on the other.
A patient needs true care. He needs someone to accompany him into the presence of God as he considers his life. It is not a place for a confident person who feels she has answers. A health crisis calls for a powerful caregiver who knows that power is the ability to help a person see what he or she is created for.
POVERTY
Workers in homeless shelters report that a person just in off the street is most anxious to tell his story. Nourishment and shelter are often not the priority. The homeless person wants the caregiver to know her. Power can give the person food and a warm place to stay, but the homeless person wants care; he wants to be known. Perhaps the homeless person does not feel recognizable as the image of God.
A poor person has been recognized as an object of care since the Sermon on the Mount, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to bridge the gap between rich and poor as that gap continues to widen in North American society. If a person feels a fundamental difference between herself and a wealthy person it can be difficult to recognize that the wealthy person needs care. Anyone we think to be self-sufficient does not seem to be a candidate for concern. Such a person is considered to be powerful, and we have come to understand that care is directed from the powerful, not toward them. Scripture teaches that God gives preference to the poor, but let us not be too ready to leave the wealthy outside our responsibility to care. In the first place, we might remember that, in the eyes of the vast majority of the world, we are the wealthy. Drinkable water and indoor plumbing qualify us as the upper class. In the second place, a reluctance to care for the wealthy is based on the definition of power that directs people and events and the definition of care that receives power from others. When we marshal the courage to accompany a person into the presence of God, we are blessed by that person’s true worth. She is more than her bank account; she is the image of God.
POLITICS
While it is a target for cynicism, nevertheless, our political system is the arena for shared values and common decision-making. Although public care giving has advanced markedly over time the notion of a shared welfare is increasingly being called into question. The ideal that public individualism gives or withholds care at the discretion of civic leaders (and, by extension, their constituents) is oxymoronic. Leaders run for public office with promises of less responsibility for each other and for the public good. While public officials call for less responsibility for the public good they call for more control of private morality. In its current state, the political process is the purest form of wielding power by directing events and resources to achieve a particular, predetermined outcome. Society looks to the source of power to care for it and finds it in politics. In the past 100 years political power has cared for society by protecting it from (by turns) women’s right to vote, the sale of alcohol, and racial integration of public schools. Those examples of predetermined, caring ends have gone, but the notion that power can achieve predetermined, caring ends is still with us. The greater the trust in overt power to care for society, the greater the misunderstanding of care. Trusting in power to care for us has justified calls to protect the powerful on the grounds that they benefit society. Care receivers are not regarded as partners in society because they are not powerful and, consequently, not a source of good. Again, this mischief is based on a bad definition of power. Care receivers often do not direct events and resources, but history has demonstrated that the direction of events and resources to achieve particular outcomes has not met with uniform success. On the other hand, care receivers are, inevitably, children of God. To join one another on a journey into the presence of God will give God a greater say in societal outcomes.
SELF
A caregiver will care for himself. She will regularly renew her relationship with God. That is a venture as far from an exercise of power as one can get. It is true that an attempt to achieve power can disguise itself as a relationship with God. We are regularly exposed to stories of people who call on their relationship with God to gain personal wealth, or to get their kids to behave, or to find a parking space downtown. It is a desire for power, not an offer of care.
In spite of contrary publicity, it is not the case that a person can determine how he should be and then, through prayer, get God to make him that way. It is, rather, that a person can venture into the presence of God and find out how God wants her to be. God will want more for that person than he could ever have imagined for himself. That is the exhilarating, exhausting nature of self-care.
GOD
To suggest that we can care for God sounds like a fingernails-on-the-chalk-board affront to all standards of propriety. It is our faith that God is all-powerful. God is to be obeyed, which is not at all the same thing as being cared for. Since God is the final word in power, if we understand care in terms of the more powerful caring for the less powerful, it will be hard to find anything less likely than a person caring for God. However, if we understand power as the ability to help a person see what he or she is created for, and we understand care as coming into the presence of God, then caring for God is a theme that runs throughout scripture. Abraham and Sarah welcomed God and made dinner in Genesis 18. Psalm 145 has provided generations of God’s people with words to bless God. In Mark 14, a woman came to Jesus and cared for him in a way that confuses us still: While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (NRSV)
The woman with the nard had no goals beyond caring for Jesus; she was not trying to achieve a predetermined outcome. It was certainly not the case that the woman saw herself as the more powerful dispenser of care to the needy Jesus. The woman had the power to recognize Jesus for who he was and she came into his presence as a caregiver. Jesus also recognized her and, more importantly for our self-understanding, Jesus recognized himself. He did not hesitate to identify himself as a care receiver. He was not threatened by a loss of power or prestige. “Some were there” who measured power in terms of achieved goals. They quickly calculated the results which came to three hundred denarii in the debit column. They saw the woman’s care as a waste “and they scolded her. We always have the pragmatists with us, and we can show kindness to them whenever we wish. Nevertheless, Jesus and the woman were joined in their understanding of true power and true care. Jesus had the power to recognize the woman as his traveling companion toward an unknown destination. He said she anointed him for burial and the anointing would be part of the proclamation of the good news. Within a few days more women planned to care for Jesus in a similar way. They went to his tomb to anoint him.
If the women who went to the tomb to anoint Jesus had measured their success by how well they achieved their goal, the trip to the tomb would be judged a failure. They would still be known as ineffective caregivers and their trip to the graveyard would be considered to be as wasted as the jar of nard. When they accompanied each other to the graveyard, they entered into the presence of God. They put themselves in a place where they could witness the resurrection.
God calls his people to care for each other, but let us not limit ourselves to our own plans. We are called to encourage each other to live as nothing less than creatures of God, and we are invited to accompany each other into the wonderful surprises of the graveyard.
