Leah Libresco Sargeant, in a wonderfully written tribute to, and call for support for, “caring work”:

In [Eva Feder] Kittay’s view, care is never a private matter, something that can be contained in a single dyad or family. Dependency creates a chain of need, which extends out into the wider world. She takes the relationship of mother and child as paradigmatic: “The relation between a needy child and the mother who tends to those needs is analogous to the mother’s own neediness and those who are in a position to meet those needs.” Caring for a child makes the mother more dependent, and gives her a just claim on others, just as the baby has a claim on her.

Kittay terms this framework doulia. She adapts doulia from doula, a person who offers care to a laboring mother. In her broader term, she encompasses “a concept of interdependence that recognizes a relation — not precisely of reciprocity but of nested dependencies — linking those who help and those who require help to give aid to those who cannot help themselves.”

Governmental support can be a response to the claims of doulia. A public, universal benefit recognizes that need is universal and that it does not obey a law of reciprocity. A baby cannot pay back the time and attention he needs from his mother; a mother does not need to earn or recompense the care she receives from others. Instead of clean-cut transactions, there is a circulatory system of care and need, where each gives to the one they can, and receives from the person who cares for them, without concern for balancing the books.

This is the spendthrift logic of the communion of the saints, who know that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40). It is the action of the woman with the alabaster jar, who pours out perfumed oil over the feet of the Lord without calculation. But the economy of grace, drawing on the inexhaustible power and love of God, doesn’t map neatly into the economy of appropriations, bills, and state-run welfare programs. […]

[The current Medicaid] framework of careworker compensation sees payment through a market lens — what would it cost to change someone’s mind about providing care? What does it cost to get them to sell their services to this particular client? The programs are worried about fraud, auditing timesheets, requiring licensing and certifications. These programs are built as though the primary risk is giving money to someone who may not have earned it.

But, in Kittay’s model of doulia, the reason for payment isn’t to persuade a caregiver to provide care. It is to enable them to offer the care they frequently already wish to provide. Compensation is often framed as wiping out altruism. If money changes hands, then the caring doesn’t count the same way it would if it were offered for free, or even at considerable cost.

In his prayer for generosity, St. Ignatius of Loyola asks the Lord to teach him, “to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil, and not to seek for rest; to labor, and not to ask for reward.” The labor of uncompensated caregivers, caregivers who are strained past exhaustion, who are consumed and eaten up by their work, can sound like the fruit of this prayer. But St. Ignatius concludes his prayer by specifying the one reward he hopes for, “to know that I am doing your will.”

Although it is admirable when someone makes tremendous sacrifices to care for others, there is always something tragic about it, too. We see the saintly person at the center of the story, disregarding their own needs for the sake of another, but, at the peripheries of the story, there are others passing by, like the priest and the Levite who hurry by the man left broken and bleeding on the side of the road. The Catholic Church recognizes certain lives as embodying “white martyrdom” — the laying down of one’s life not in a single moment of death, but denial of self through poverty or celibacy. The martyr’s witness is always a testimony to God’s goodness, but, as with the “red martyrdom” of those killed for the faith, the actions of the person demanding the sacrifice can be wicked. It is good to serve the poor, it is sinful to impoverish. It is not God’s will for anyone to be neglected or left for dead, whether they are the initial victim of misfortune or someone who, in giving all they have, is newly vulnerable as a result.

We are not called to stand by and admire the white martyrdom of hard charities. We are called to answer need with our own gifts. But too often, our systems of care work presume that they can wring more and more work out of the families of the vulnerable, trusting that they will sacrifice themselves if we hold back our own help.

Sargeant goes on to tell the story of Tina, a 40-year-old teacher who was essentially required by her hospital and insurance company to coordinate the care for her brother with leukemia after his bone marrow transplant—even if she had to quit her job to do it. “Her work was admirable,” Sargeant writes, “as was that of her friends and relatives, but it is hollow to praise her without condemning the hard-hearted system that handed her this cross to carry, and then abandoned her.”

Here’s how she closes:

There is no sacrifice we make out of love for another that God disdains. But when we leave caregivers and their charges without support, we are like the Pharisees, who, Jesus says, “tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matt 23:4). From the beginning of the Church, the martyrs gave testimony of the depth of their love for God in their willingness to die rather than to renounce Him. We benefit from their witness, but we have no reason to be grateful to their persecutors. Paul addresses this question in his letter to the Romans, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” (Rom 6:1-2).

Persecution can make visible the love that might have otherwise expressed itself in more hidden ways, but we must learn to see the quiet virtues, rather than rely on sin and suffering to expose these loves to light. In answering the needs of caregivers, in living out Kittay’s vision of doulia, we respond rightly to others’ willingness to become lowly out of love. We honor the willingness to suffer by not demanding sacrifice. Love answers love, and our strengths are given to us only that we might be good stewards in spending them.

Phil Christman, with a passing view of David Bentley Hart’s new book:

Another thing that Hart’s system can’t give us is “an unimpeachable claim to Christian orthodoxy as many people define it.” His new Tradition and Apocalypse answers this charge the only way one can: By saying, in effect, “Well, so’s your mother.” No religious tradition is particularly stable. No version of Christianity doesn’t reject a whole lot of other ones. Our record of the early church’s beliefs and behavior, even if we just confine ourselves to what we find in the New Testament, shows a group of people whose opinions sit at every point on every chart, about very important things. … What else would one expect? These people had just watched history get invaded by God. He unfurled himself around it … and … died. Then he came back, ate fish, and flew away.

The attempt to keep fidelity with such a bizarre event will surely involve as much disagreement and confusion as unity “Faith,” [Hart] writes, “is not the assurance that one possesses the fullness of truth, but is rather a fidelity to the future disclosure of the full meaning of what little one already knows.” Efforts to reach “back through the welter of contingent events to some initial and pure impulse whose subsequent unfolding could then be followed” are doomed to failure, however interesting they may be. We are looking forward to love’s full disclosure, at the end of time, and for now we know love only – how else? – as through a glass darkly.

I would only clarify, for my own sake, at least, that those efforts to “reach back and follow” are doomed not to failure but to strife, friction. Understanding them this way can produce much harmony and joy in the midst of the strife—in the midst of the friction-that-is-not-failure.

In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.

That’s Perry Hildebrandt in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I do love a Franzen novel, and this was no exception. But I don’t recall the last time I read a book that was more enjoyable and more . . . hopeless.

Perry’s thought continues:

On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.

Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequalae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities.

It is this—the perpetual chasing of all our moral ontological/epistemological lives in our over- (and yet also under-) conscious brains—that ought to be understood as the focus of Crossroads. Certainly, for almost all of us, it will never be the cocaine-driven godlike forethought and planning that follows this particular one of Perry’s ceaseless moral deliberations, nor the more natural, cocaine-less deliberations of the Hildebrandt’s that make up the 580 pages of the novel. But for anyone honest enough to look, Franzen holds up a mirror to all the self-justification that takes place in any given home or church or on any given street on any given day.

Not having any idea what Franzen’s religious experience is like, it does seem to me that he has managed to describe the moments of religious insight throughout the book with genuine feeling, so much so that I imagine Franzen going over and over removing any hint of narrative sarcasm. This is, I think, quite an achievement.

And yet…as far as I can remember in reading Franzen over the past week, all moments of grace, every last one, if and where they appear, seem most certainly to terminate in the self involved in that grace. It is perhaps true, however—and only really true in hindsight—that what does exist for the reader (at least for this reader) is a grace for certain characters at certain times when those characters are not the mind being narrated—and, equally important, this does not occur in the mind being narrated either; it just sort of slips in. And that seems important.

Christian Wiman, on the complexity of the definition of “joy”:

Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word “soul.” That sensation more exalting than happiness, less graspable than hope, though both of these feelings are implicated, challenged, changed. That seed of being that can bud even in our “circumstance of ice,” as Danielle Chapman puts it, so that faith suddenly is not something one need contemplate, struggle for, or even “have,” really, but is simply there, as the world is there. There is no way to plan for, much less conjure, such an experience. One can only, like Lucille Clifton—who in the decade during which I was responsible for awarding the annual Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry for lifetime achievement was the one person who let out a spontaneous yawp of delight on the phone—try to make oneself fit to feel the moment when it comes, and let it carry you where it will.

Grace may also be something like this. But if grace finds its way into Crossroads at all, it seems to do so without even the sort of preparation for unexpected joy that Wiman refers to. Somehow, it seems to me that grace simply doesn’t exist for most of the characters throughout most of the book. But it most certainly can exist between the reader and those characters. In the middle of all the self-justifying and moralizing, grace, like joy, just sort of slips in from somewhere outside. I could be wrong, but this seems to be almost in spite of Franzen, as it is so often for most of us in spite of ourselves.

As much as I’d like to agree with Ruth Graham’s assessment of the “sincerity” of Christian experience in the book—and I want to see it—I just can’t. In Crossroads, God seems to exist only in the psyches of each character, which might itself be a reality difficult for any of us to disentangle from. But more importantly, with perhaps one exception in the book (and it’s an exception that Franzen has always proven quite good at relating: the hard and painful reconciliation of partners), God or the experience of God or the thought of God never quite rises to a shared experience, is never quite something beyond the self.

I was reading Rowan Williams’s Tokens of Trust just after reading Franzen. It was not quite planned, but for this believer quite helpful for my own psyche.

Only when the last traces of self-serving and self-comforting have been shaken and broken are we free to receive what God wants to give us. Only then shall we have made room for God’s reality by disentangling God from all—or at least some—of the mess within our psyches. Prayer is letting God be himself in and for us. . . . And because the reality is so immeasurably greater than any mind or heart or imagination can take in, we must let go in order to make room. (emphasis added)

No, we probably never achieve a full disentangling (“What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasurable. . . . I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.”), and thankfully we do not have to. But after almost 600 pages of what can only be described as inner turmoil, however alluring the prose, who could not be hungry for this freedom, hungry for a silence that let’s God do something, anything? Somehow, I see Crossroads as both an excellent mirror for all the self-justifying we are all so prone to, and yet also as falling utterly short of the self-forgetfulness that we all experience and (can) know as the grace of God.

Sara Zarr:

Maybe it’s my particular dysfunction and my poor-kid anxiety leading me to find comfort in the videos and in fantasies of whittling my belongings down to what would fit in a few plastic tubs from Walmart and driving out to a harsh landscape to get away from a certain kind of comfort that (I have this fleeting sense) is hurting me. What I know is that the older I get, the more sadness I feel that what the world asks of us is so narrowly defined, and that what religion requires can be, too. I’m missing the friction that should exist between a faithful life and accepted normalcy. Maybe I miss the weirdness of my poor, Jesusy, hippie childhood when my faith felt uncontained. Fern, in her guest quarters at her sister’s house and, later, at a friend’s, feels that the walls are too far apart, the ceiling too high. There is too much space; existence is static; there’s nothing to move toward or push against. She looks longingly out the window at her van. Another way of life is calling. I’m familiar with that sense of being out of place in this world, and though I’ve long left church, a part of me still believes that for people of sincere faith, that discomfort is how it should be.

Matthew Loftus (emphasis added):

Christians must develop and encourage practices of suffering that accompany those in pain, like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross during Christ’s passion.^[2] The ethical imperatives of the Church are only intelligible to a watching world to the degree that Christians are willing to walk alongside those who suffer and bear their pain with them. Without these practices of accompaniment, Christian moral teaching about issues like abortion or assisted reproductive technology is a cold set of rules enforced by people who have the privilege of not having to bear their cost. It is through these experiences — and not just experiences with those who forsake an accessible but immoral technological intervention, but also accompaniment with the poor, the imprisoned, and those whose suffering cannot be relieved by any human means — that Christians are able to experience growth through suffering and acquire the perspective from below that shapes their advocacy for those who need the work-towards-shalom the most. […]

The first goal of those with power will be to maximize the power of institutions and relationships not specifically governed by any professional authority. The weaker these institutions are, the more that the physical health of the community will suffer, and the more tempted that doctors and bureaucrats will want to step in and replace the social and spiritual pillars of human mutuality with an eclectic and insufficient patchwork of programming, subsidies, and drugs. The natural benefits of meaningful work, intimate friendships, loving family, rich spirituality, and shared spaces are self-evidently critical to human flourishing, but impossible for practitioners and policymakers to produce or purchase. Laws, regulations, and authoritative communications should always consider whether or not they help or hinder these contributors to shalom, and take seriously the possibility that horning in on the territory belonging to these things could do more harm than good, even if there are good intentions in doing so. Since these things cannot be measured or evaluated from afar, such assessments will require those with power (political, administrative, or medical) to spend a significant amount of time in whatever communities they purport to represent or serve. […]

[T]he inevitability of suffering and death in this age should humble those with power in their aspirations to shalom and force us all to constantly consider whether or not we are helping the people we know and love (especially the ones that we find it difficult to love) to do good themselves. The soil-tilling, trellis-building, stake-digging, stem-pruning, weed-pulling work that allows us to cultivate shalom in that smallest unit of health, the community, is ultimately subservient to the bonds of love that hold every thread in our shared tapestry together. Pursuing shalom, especially those with some sort of professional authority, must work with nature, respect the limits of the created order, avoid the trap of making every aspect of human existence a matter of “health”, allow smaller institutions to do what they do best, and be conscientious about what kinds of suffering to try to alleviate. […]

Christians should continue to be more concerned with loving their neighbors than they are about preserving their own lives. I have made the argument before that I think getting vaccinated is an expression of love, and I think that, given the relatively low risk of vaccine side effects even for those who have already had COVID-19, that this judgment still applies in the case of the vaccines which have undergone rigorous testing.^[4] By the same token, allowing any preventive measure to trump other concerns in the name of health runs the risk of letting legitimate concern become paralyzing paranoia. In all seasons, those who follow Christ must not let a concern for an abstract “other” or suspicion of a malevolent “them” promulgate foolishness, grandiosity, hatred, or obtrusiveness.

The official pronouncements about public health we have heard in the last two years are merely one small facet of human health’s contingent nature. We all depend on one another for the flourishing of life, and I hope and trust that most people are willing to acknowledge that dependence and contingency as we deal with the greatest infectious health crisis of our era. In affirming that “conviviality is healing,” as Wendell Berry says, we must be willing to carefully consider about what sorts of sacrifices and risks are worth it for the sake of others — and then, having considered, to act as those who love the goods of creation and are willing to suffer as we proclaim another life to come.