You guys came through for K and her son!
plus a reading recommendation
Just a short note to say in the 24 hours since I asked for your help covering short-term expenses for domestic violence survivor K and her son, you guys covered our $1200 shortfall with about $600 extra to spare! I’ll send all the money her way to cover the need we anticipate for her upcoming court hearing, and a little for her rainy day fund.
A lot of people gave $20 each, and at least one person gave more than ten times that. I’m very grateful to have a mix of both—it’s what we’ve relied on to sustain K as she builds her new life. The group of women who have been the primary supports so far have a lot of variation in what we can give financially. I’ve been the bundler so that we can help without revealing who gave how much.
It takes a village.
Relatedly, I really enjoyed this Plough essay from Matthew Burdette: “Everyone Is Eventually a Burden.”
Igot to know the theologian Robert W. Jenson during the final years of his life. Like many people, I first met him on the page, starting with his Systematic Theology. But I soon discovered that he and I worshiped at the same church and, not only that, we liked to sit in the same south transept. One Sunday, I leaned over the pew in front of me to where he was seated in a wheelchair and asked, “Are you Robert Jenson?” He looked at me perplexedly and, after a long pause, finally said, “Well, that’s my name.” Soon thereafter, I was invited to call him “Jens,” and before long I was visiting him at his home about twice each week. As our friendship grew, I would sometimes keep him company while his wife, Blanche, left the house so that he wouldn’t be alone. By this time, he was unable to get himself a drink or something to eat or walk unassisted to the bathroom.
On one occasion, after assisting him to and from the bathroom, Jens frustratedly muttered something about being a burden. I insisted, “You’re not a burden.” At this, he looked at me and said very clearly, “Yes, I am. Everyone is eventually a burden.”
His surprise at my pastorally inept response, and my surprise at his candor, centered around the same problem: my politeness.
This is, of course, one of the major themes of The Dignity of Dependence. We all start out as a burden as a baby, even if it’s as a welcome, longed-for one. Almost all of us will have a period of burden-hood as we prepare to die. And those who don’t are not usually those we regard as lucky—those killed suddenly and unexpectedly in the prime of life through e.g. a car accident or a heart attack.
One of the small shifts I suggest in talks is answering “Thank you,” with a firm “You’re welcome,” rather than a “It’s nothing.” Through many little choices, we use politeness to screen out acknowledging asymmetries of need and debt.
And then? Well, as Burdette puts it:
The question that generally goes unasked and therefore unanswered is: what happens to people who are a burden once they have been totally buffered from the acknowledgment of this fact?
I suggest that such people will often do everything in their power to turn the polite denial into the truth: they will try not to be a burden. Politely denying that someone is burdensome in fact denies that person the freedom to be a burden, even when burdensomeness is involuntary, so that the person is weighed down by his or her own dependence. To be clear, this dynamic is not present in every experience of being burdened: for example, I love my children, and it really doesn’t bother me when my daughter or son wakes me up at night. Love has a way of blinding us to the cost of bearing other people. At the same time, neither my children nor my love for them would be served were I to pretend that I’m not exhausted after a series of nighttime interruptions. Love may relieve the feeling of being burdened, and it energizes us to give of ourselves, but it does not alter the basic fact we must carry one another and that we get worn down. When we pretend that we are not exhausted by the demands put on us, the very love that binds us to ones whose burdens we carry is malformed into a force that keeps us apart and isolates us and those who depend on us.
As far as I can remember, I’ve found taking care of myself burdensome. I recently discovered I’ve been subconsciously projecting that onto everyone around me, believing that others must see me as a burden, too.
I was talking with my older sister about something she had done for me when I was small, and that I’d thought of as an example of how onerous I must have been to the family system. She told me that ‘burden’ was never how she’d experienced me, and that my dependence on her at that time had been a huge blessing for her, which she cherished.
Is there value to distinguishing between burdening and depending? Does the connotation of distaste have to apply to burden?
My young adult daughter and I have been reading your Dignity of Dependence book and discussing it. It's really thought provoking, thanks!
It's been liberating to acknowledge that we are all dependent on each other, just more or less at various times in our lives - and that the image of independence as as attainable ideal is pretty much fiction.
Personally, I've gone from considering myself a high energy, competent woman with a physically active job to someone with a chronic spine condition that, while not entirely immobilizing, will likely always limit my physical activity and/or result in surgery with uncertain results.
I'm so thankful for my Catholic faith in the goodness of God, and the knowledge that my value doesn't rest in how much I can physically do. Still hard though :)