I realize as I was typing the one word title, “Help,” it would be even better if I could add a voice tone to the word. How we say the word communicates much more than simply seeing it in print. I can utter the word, help, with a tone of desperation and have people scurrying to my aid. This must happen often in the emergency rooms in hospitals. Or we have heard kids---often our own kids---scream for help. Even using that verb, scream, gives our word, help, a great deal of urgency.
On the other hand, I have often see signs in a window advertising, “help wanted.” Or the sign might simply use a single word, help. While this is an offer, there is no urgency. I can read the sign with no particular urge to offer help. I don’t need a job or money, so there is little interest to help. I shrug and hope they find someone who does want to help.
The third thing I thought about was the sign you might see at other stores. The sign might say, “help yourself.” Oddly enough, this sign is telling you, if you want something, take it. There is no one else who is going to help you! You can help yourself, but there is no other source of help. This is the opposite of being helpless. If you are helpless, you have no chance unless someone is willing to help. And if it says “help yourself,” you are on your own. It’s you or nothing!
I began thinking about all this in my continued reading of David Whyte’s book, Consolation. Whyte takes ordinary words---like help---and reflects on them in different and deep ways. This enables the reader to think much deeper about what it means to be human and what more might be available to us if we think more deeply and grow more. Reading Whyte’s reflections on help did this to me.
He begins his reflections on help by allowing that many of us would rather not need. I count myself in that camp. I act as if I never need any help. And so I laugh when Whyte begins by saying, “Help is strangely, something we want to do without…” Quickly he rightly points out, this is folly. We all need help from the very beginning. We all know how utterly helpless a newborn baby is. I grew up on a farm and watched newborn baby calves be up and nursing in an hour or so. Not so for newborn human babies.
In fact, Whyte says we will need various forms of help all our lives. Of course, some of us prefer the illusion that we really don’t need help. Arrogantly, we think we are strong enough, smart enough, etc. to do without help. This comparing process does not serve us well. I call it comparing process, because seeing myself strong suggests others are seen as weak. Clearly, it is illusory, because it hides my own weakness. I need to come clean. We all need help.
Whyte articulates it in a much more profound way. He suggests, “It may be that the ability to know the necessity for help; to know how to look for help and then most importantly, how to ask for it, is one of the primary transformative dynamics that allows us to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives.” (109) Recognizing and asking for help is an appropriate and mature way to be. To be able to do this is to participate in what he calls “primary transformative” dynamic toward growth. This is where it begins to become very spiritual for me.
Finally, he nails the real reason so many of us don’t want to ask for help. It requires vulnerability to want or need help. And some of us don’t want to be vulnerable and don’t want to be seen to be vulnerable. We prefer control! But listen to Whyte’s wise words. He acknowledges, “without the robust vulnerability in asking for help we cannot pass through the door that bars us from the next dispensation of our lives…”
And I love his next phrase: “we cannot birth ourselves.” I am reminded of all the talk about “self–made men” and “women.” That comes with slogans, such as, “I can do it myself.” From the mouths of two-year olds, this is funny. In the actions of grown women and men, it is sad and, often, pathetic. Whyte is to the point when he claims, “To ask for help and to ask for the right kind of help and to feel that it is no less than our due as a live human being; to feel, in effect, that we deserve it, may be the engine of transformation itself.”
To recognize that is deeply spiritual. We are all children of God. We are no more able to live outside the Spirit than we are able to take care of ourselves upon birth. To be sure, we are responsible for our lives. But we are also creatures of grace---the theological version of help. On our own we will make a mess. If you are not sure, turn to the Christian Bible for a refresher course. In the beginning God was creative. By chapter three Adam and Eve come up short and in chapter four there is a murder!
Grace is God’s gift. It is always transformative. It turns us into the people we were meant to be. When we are in control, we never need to be grateful. When we have help and when we receive grace, our only response is “thank you.” Gratitude makes us nicer people. We are transformed and made ready to live in community.
My prayer is I be delivered from the illusion that I need no help. Thank you.
Those of us who have read theology or, perhaps, those who are people of faith and are old enough might well recognize this title as a reminder of the late Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber. I remember reading Buber’s book, I and Thou , when I was in college in the 1960s. It was already a famous book by then. I am not sure I fully understood it, but that would not be the last time I read it. It has been a while since I looked at the book. Buber came up in a conversation with a friend who asked if I had seen the recent article by David Brooks? I had not seen it, but when I was told about it, I knew I would quickly locate and read that piece. I very much like what Brooks decides to write about and what he contributes to societal conversation. I wish more people read him and took him seriously. ...
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