What Can You Pour From an Empty Cup?
The witness offered by want and suffering
Every Monday, I share a new essay or conversation prompt with the 750+ members of Other Feminisms. On Thursdays, I share highlights from last week’s conversation. This Thursday, I’ll be sharing some of your comments on “Gift-Work Becomes Women’s Work.”
“You have to put on your own oxygen mask first.”
“You can’t pour from an empty cup.”
“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
I’ve heard variants on all these sayings in women’s spaces. At their best, they’re a way of giving permission to treat ourselves like people, rather than caring for everyone but ourself. They speak to a real difficulty, especially for women, in knowing when self-gift becomes self-erasure.
But they can also come with a message of “no.”
If you’re too tired, too neglected, too ill, too weak, you don’t have anything to give until your own cup is filled again, by yourself or by somebody else. The world can feel divided into the helpful and the helpless.
I saw a countervailing idea when I was reading Robert Hugh Benson’s The Friendship of Christ for a Lenten book club. In his reflections on Christ’s last words from the Cross, Benson dwells on a different idea of gift when Christ tells Mary, “Behold your son,” and John, “Behold your mother,” as they stand at the foot of the Cross, unable to aid Him in His Passion.
Benson sees in this passage a call to unity that isn’t founded on strength. He writes:
Now the union of men with one another is, in one sense, the object of every human society. There has been verified gradually even in the most worldly spheres that fact which has always been preached by Christianity, that union is strength, that co-operation is better than competition, that to “lose self” in a Society of some kind is the only means of saving self; that individuality can be retained only by the sacrifice of individualism. But in practically all human societies that have ever existed, the bond of union is thought to be one of prosperity. “If we can rejoice together, win together, triumph together, we shall be able to love one another.”
Now Jesus Christ does something that has never been done before. He uses suffering as the supreme bond of love.
Sarah C. Williams saw another example of this kind of unity through suffering in the life of Josephine Butler, a turn-of-the-century feminist. In an essay for Plough, Williams wrote about how Butler “connected the experience of personal grief with the corporate grief of womankind.” Butler lost her daughter in an accident, and went out of her house to the oakum sheds where destitute women unravelled rope for meager wages.
For two years after Eva’s death, Butler wrestled with depression and despair. It was during this time that she first visited the oakum sheds. “I had no clear idea beyond that,” she writes, “no plan for helping others; my sole wish was to plunge into the heart of some human misery and to say (as I then knew I could) to afflicted people, I understand: I too have suffered.”
In the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing unusual in middle-class women doing “rescue work” among prostitutes or “fallen women,” as they were known. But Butler refused to call her visits to the Brownlow workhouse rescue work; instead, she talked about individual women with names, faces, and histories – women who were her friends. She refused to use the term “prostitute” or “fallen woman” and instead adopted the word “outcast” to describe the lives of these women.
There was no requirement that Butler become whole or healed before caring for others. She was bound to others not by prosperity, but by need and sorrow.
If we can give only out of our own abundance, only the comfortable and well can be generous. If our pains and crosses can be our gift, we are never left unable to begin friendships or care for others.
Have you ever found yourself dividing the world into givers and receivers?
Are there times when you could not care for yourself, but could care for others?
P.S. To my amusement, as I tried to track down a source for “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” Google suggested “you can’t pour from an empty cup bible verse.” I’m reminded of Louise Fitzhugh’s The Long Secret, in which there is some confusion about the source of unsigned notes, but general agreement they must be quoting the Bible or Shakespeare.
Sometimes giving to others has been the only way I’ve kept going at all, the only way I felt like I had value. My cup was empty for me, but full for others. And I think....that’s ok? The demand that women give to the point of self-sacrifice can be toxic for sure, but yes, I have often found myself giving from my brokenness, not from my abundance.
I specifically remember a day when I was in the midst of the worst depressive episode of my life. My abusive marriage was unraveling, but had not yet entirely unraveled; I was in the thick of it. My main emotional support was my best friend, but his mother was dying in another state. Furthermore, a large chunk of the rest of my support network was wrapped up in a disastrous drama revolving around a years-old accusation of sexual abuse by one person I cared for very much against another person whom I deeply loved.
I’m a hospitalist and I was working on the cancer floor of the hospital. Every hour or so, I had to slip into the stairwell and sob. I would close my eyes and contemplate just driving my car off the overpass, or maybe into a road cut.
On the day I am thinking of, one of my patients was being worked up for a new and life-threatening diagnosis. There were all sorts of challenging logistical problems at play, largely because his care had taken place over multiple hospital systems. I must have spent at least four hours (probably more) phoning multiple hospitals and specialists, getting them to phone conference with each other, transferring imaging studies and lab reports from one system to another, and calling various family members to talk them through everything.
It’s always meaningful to me when family members thank me, but my patient’s daughter thanked me that day, and only the fact that I had made a fairly recent stairwell visit stopped me from crying, heh. Knowing that I could still give even when I had absolutely nothing was a gift I have never let go of.
I attribute this not to me but to grace, to be fair; I think when we give from our emptiness that’s often because, hmmmm, sometimes the times when we have absolutely nothing are the only times when we are able to get out of God’s way and let Him fill us. Thinking back on it now, I think one of the most important lessons from that day is that it’s never really me who is giving anyway; it’s always God’s love working through me.
I just realize it more when I myself have nothing.
It's often easy to think of suffering as a separating thing, I think, because sufferers tend to be seen as locked away within their own bubble: that we can't understand them, and they're unable to focus on anything other than their pain so they can't understand the rest of us who have *lives*. But of course that's not the case. I really like the idea of offering up our sufferings for each other, because, yes, you can have a bit of a bond with someone if you're suffering the same general kind of thing as they are even if nowhere near the same intensity (I'm thinking here of the example of myself and one of my aunts: she's been in enormous chronic pain for a couple of years and in contrast my day-to-day pains, that I've come to think of as ordinary, and which are hardly ever entirely disabling, is *nothing*), whereas perfectly healthy and happy people just don't get it. (If anyone anywhere ever *is* perfectly healthy and happy.) But when you deliberately turn your suffering to good use beyond the "oh yes, I can understand" conversation, and use it to pray for the other person all the time even when you're miles and miles apart, that can really bring you close.
Along another train of thought, it's comforting to know that even when we are empty cups, God can still pour Himself out of us. To take a tiny example, it's terribly difficult to get myself put together and out the door on time each day. I'm almost never right on time, let alone early, for anything, so on those rare occasions where I am, it's obvious to everyone that it wasn't just me making that happen. Similarly, I'm so clumsy and unskilled when it comes to helping people that when something I say or do does lighten their burdens in some way, it *has* to be clear that it was "not I but Christ who lives in me*. Which is reassuring to me in turn --- to remember that no, I'm not too broken for God to use. I don't have to worry about pulling the right things out of myself when I know they're not there.