Sometimes it’s all about perspective, remembering where we stand in this world.
Recently, a nurse from my health insurance company called me to check in on how I am progressing from hip replacement surgery last June. After a bumpy first few months of recovery when I wondered if I would ever walk normally again, walk without pain, I was so happy to tell her my hip feels almost completely healed.
“That’s great. Just a few more questions before we wrap up today,” she said.
“Fire away,” I said, even as I wondered what else she could possibly ask me about, having covered all aspects of my health. What else could threaten my well-being right now?
“In the past two weeks have you thought about harming yourself?”
“In the past two weeks have you felt unsafe in your home or in your neighborhood?”
“In the past two weeks have you been able to purchase enough food for you and your family?”
“In the past two weeks, have you felt in danger of losing your job?”
“In the past two weeks have you worried about losing your home or becoming homeless?”
My answer to each of those questions was “no.”
But as she dutifully inquired about parts of my life, parts of living that, truth be told, I so often take for granted as a given, I couldn’t help but wonder…well, what if I answered “yes” to one or more of those questions? What if beyond an achy hip I was in such despair that I’d want to take my own life? What if I had more mouths to feed than my own, and just did not have the money to put enough food on the table? What if the job I so love was taken away from me with an impersonal email: “We regret to inform you….”? What if this comfortable and cozy house I get to live in was gone tomorrow, and I had to scramble to find a place to lay my head on the pillow?
What if? What if?
One of the hard truths I’ve come to face in the past year, as COVID has ravaged our society, is how much this virus hasn’t just attacked the body. It’s also revealed and made worse, the wide disparities of life in our nation. It’s shown the huge gulf between the haves and the have nots, the rich and the poor, someone like me whose zip code reveals that I live a very good life, almost too privileged a life, while another person’s zip code might doom them and their family to daily struggle, even despair.
Consider: according to a recent New York Times article (“We Did Not Suffer Equally”), while overall employment levels for the wealthiest of Americans dropped by just 1 percent in the last year, employment for the bottom 25 percent of Americans dropped by 28 percent. Consider: in Massachusetts, according to the Greater Boston Food Bank, our state saw the largest growth in food insecurity in the country, since March 2020; a staggering increase of 59 percent. Consider: because of COVID deaths, white Americans saw their life expectancy drop by a full year but Black Americans by almost three years.
While my idea of a bad day is spending too many hours on Zoom calls and meetings, not very far from where I live, a bad day means standing in a long line at the food pantry. Waiting for hours to get an appointment at the public health clinic for your sick child. Going to bed and staying up all night, worrying about if you’ll ever find a job again.
We’re not just experiencing a pandemic of the body in the United States. We’re also witnessing a pandemic of class divides and race divides and geography divides and education divides. Those seemingly innocuous questions my nurse asked me; these convicted me in a way, and reminded me that from a moral perspective, I can’t really be “healthy”, not in the largest sense, unless every other child of God gets to be healthy too. Healthy—and not just in body but in mind and in spirit and in heart as well.
The gift of the faith I practice is that it teaches me I cannot be fully the child of God I am meant to be, unless my neighbor also gets to be the child of God they are meant to be, as well. This moral perspective in life asks us to view life, not just through our own eyes or our own experiences, but also through the eyes and the experiences of others, and “the other” too.
I don’t have to do that of course, practice radical empathy. I can live in my comfortable social bubble. I can focus on taking care of me and my own and no others. With the craziness of life these days and the herculean tasks all of face in trying to get through COVID challenges, it’s easy to have a narrow perspective. I get that.
But what if you and I; what if we answered “yes” to one or more of that nurse’s questions? Dare we take that perspective? For then we’d certainly pray and hope that someone else cared for us and saw us too. We’d absolutely depend upon the compassion of our neighbors and the help of government and the mercy of private charities like houses of worship.
Life is, finally, all about perspective. Knowing where we stand but also knowing where others stand in this world too.
What if?
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