The Love I Could Not Give

A few years ago, I achieved sainthood. Or at least that’s what some people said. Here’s how it happened. A woman who attended my Quaker meeting, but who had a difficult personality, became very ill. In many ways, Sally was a good person, but few people were able to spend much time with her. Like almost everyone who came into her orbit, I avoided her. When the Covid pandemic struck, I did not reach out to her, even though I knew she was very isolated, without family and living by herself on a mountain at the end of a terrible road.

Shortly after the world began to reopen, my husband and I visited the Spring Valley Bruderhof. A devoted reader of Plough magazine, which is published by the Bruderhof, I had long been curious about those led to live in close Christian community, sharing everything in common and caring for each other from cradle to grave. I came away from my visit deeply impressed and thought about how the first Quakers also had a strong ethic of mutual care. For at least a century, Quakers lived in close communities that provided whole-life support similar to that of the Bruderhof.

We twenty-first-century Quakers live much more “in the world” and, to a large extent, have been captured by the highly individualistic, atomized American lifestyle. In the wake of my visit to Spring Valley, I thought about how, in a more modest way, I could embody the care exhibited by the Bruderhof members and earlier Quakers. Sally came to mind and, in the first flush of resolve, I overcame my reluctance and extended my good intentions in her direction.

When I visited her, I discovered that, isolated and unable to navigate the medical system, she had become deathly ill. Unless someone took control of the situation, she would die. That someone, in the absence of anyone else, would be me.

Photograph by Jasmin Merdan / Alamy Stock.

I recruited a small number of good souls from my Quaker meeting to help with her care even as she resisted our efforts to get her the medical attention she desperately needed. Her delay led to further health complications and it was several months before she was able to undergo lifesaving surgery. During that time, we did just about everything for her. We fed her and shopped for her. We took care of her personal hygiene and cleaned her house. Eventually, my husband and I had to move her into our very small home when she was too sick to care for herself.

Throughout the three months of her hospitalization and rehab, I remained by her side, ever hopeful that once she was “fixed” I could again retreat from her life. Vain hope. With her driver’s license medically suspended, she was totally dependent on others to drive her everywhere to buy groceries, run errands, and keep medical appointments. Time passed and months turned into years. The care circle dwindled until it was mostly me. Hence my designation as a “saint,” which, bleakly, I came to interpret as code for “I, a lesser mortal, am not willing to help.”

We good people, I realized, expect God to reward us for our good deeds by allowing us to feel good about ourselves. All I felt was the dead weight of obligation and a burning desire to escape. I wanted Sally to be someone else’s problem. The most I could muster was compassion for one of the loneliest and least loved people I had ever met. I also knew that I could not give her what she most needed: love and affirmation. The harder she tried to elicit these from me, the more I resisted.

Like most, I talk a lot about the power of love even though I am uncomfortably aware that I practice it selectively. I assumed if I did all the right things – was faithful, prayed, adhered to my Quaker practice, was “spiritual,” etc. – then I would somehow, magically, be filled with love for everyone. I simply had to be willing to show up, and God would ease my chore by filling my heart with warm feelings. Not so, I discovered. After listening to one of my long complaints about the situation, a friend asked, “Where is God in this?” I came up blank. God appeared to have left the building.

After two and a half years, during which time Sally resolutely refused to follow what I considered my excellent advice while still making heavy demands on my time, I had had enough. I walked away from her even though I knew she was not capable of managing her life. I told her she could call on me for help anytime, but having been abandoned many times, she recognized my abandonment for what it was. I resumed my life and waited for the other shoe to drop.

A hard truth I learned from this experience is that in trying to help Sally I had reached the limit of what a human can do to fulfill the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

It is a lot easier to extend a largely theoretical love to the neighbors we don’t know, especially if they are at a distance and less fortunate than ourselves – refugees, victims of war and famine, the poor – than to the ones who are a real part of our lives. We write a check or volunteer at the local food bank. Sometimes it might be an actual neighbor who needs their grass cut or a ride to the grocery store. We’re happy to do it with the implicit understanding that it should not impinge too much on our own lives. Occasionally, however, our neighbor is someone who is “difficult.” To those, our “gift of love” is grudging and time-limited and is usually offered through a poisonous filter of judgment.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “When we judge other people, we confront them in a spirit of detachment, observing and reflecting as it were from the outside. But love has neither time nor opportunity for this. If we love, we can never observe the other person with detachment, for he is always and at every moment a living claim to our love and service.”

I cannot recall a single minute I spent with Sally when I was not mentally reinforcing my negative opinion of her. While I truly believe God led me to help her, once I was on the scene, I fell entirely upon my own resources to “fix” the problem. In my efforts to be in control, I left no room for Christ.

Agape is considered the highest form of Christian love. It is selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. It is exemplified by God’s love for humanity and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Reading these words, it is hard not to feel uplifted, but they are just words on a page until you find yourself called to make this love real toward someone you hope will just go away.

My time with Sally taught me of the need for metanoia – the perpetual conversion of the fundamental attitudes of my heart. This can only come through grace. For the first time I truly understand Paul’s words, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). Any chance of me having a loving relationship with Sally was doomed from the start because I never intended for it to be either loving or enduring. I treated it as a SWAT mission – parachute in, fix the problem, helicopter out.

During the many hours I spent with Sally, I struggled with what I thought was a strong inner resistance to her. Now I realize that the resistance was to Christ, who was knocking insistently on the door of my heart.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I have always assumed that Jesus was referring to people who were materially rich. But was I not guilty of hoarding my “treasure” – a heart that has never known anything but love and acceptance?

The disciples, who were not materially rich, appear to have understood that Jesus was talking about all of humanity. “Who then can be saved?” they asked. Jesus replied, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:25–26).

The simple truth is that we cannot be parsimonious with our hearts. I must be “wholehearted” in answering Jesus’ call to follow him. Only then can I – the person I think am and who I cling to – be crucified with Christ so that Christ can live in me.

I also learned from my experience with Sally that we frail and imperfect humans cannot practice love alone. We need to be part of a loving community of faith that works together to care for “the least of these” – and not just the ones we like or who are at a comfortable distance.

On a second visit to the Spring Valley Bruderhof while I was still in the thick of caring for Sally, I shared my frustrations with my friends, Mark and Rachel. They told me of a Bruderhof member who suffered from mental illness and was not easy to care for. But caretaking at a Bruderhof does not fall to just one person. When a community acts together as the body of Christ, the person being cared for – be it the very young or the very old, the disabled, the ill, or the unlikeable – is held in many arms. Agape – God’s covenant of love for his creation – has a much greater chance of finding expression. Together, the joys and burdens are shared, and each member is accountable to the others, who can help guard against judgmentalism and burnout. Both the caregivers and the cared-for grow in the Spirit.

In “Why We Live in Community,” Bruderhof founder Eberhard Arnold writes:

Faith gives us the ability to see people as they are, not as they present themselves…. Faith takes seriously the fact that we human beings, with our present natural makeup, are incapable of community. Temperamental mood-swings, possessive impulses and cravings for physical and emotional satisfaction, powerful currents of ambition and touchiness, the desire for personal influence over others, and human privileges of all kinds – all these place seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way of true community…. But with faith we cannot be deluded into thinking that these real weaknesses of human nature are decisive. On the contrary, in the face of the power of God and his all-conquering love, they are of no significance. God is stronger than these realities. The community-creating energy of his Spirit overcomes them all.

I take Jesus’ words that “with God all things are possible” as a promise that I can, indeed, love my neighbor as myself, even those neighbors whom I would prefer not to see. My experience with Sally deepened my understanding of what faithful discipleship looks like. The love of Christ for all of humanity, which we are called to share, is not a rain barrel that we draw on when our personal bucket is dry. It grows within us as we go about the daily business of taking up our cross and following Jesus. It is the fruit of prayer and reflection, humility and repentance. It is a “whole heart” experience. And it is not an “I” experience; it is a “we” experience.

One evening, fourteen months after I exited Sally’s life, I received a phone call from a doctor in an intensive care unit. Sally had gone into cardiac arrest while out doing errands. With no one else to call, the doctor called me because I was listed in Sally’s medical records as her medical power of attorney. My heart sank, not from concern, but because I feared that once again I was about to be drawn into the vortex of Sally’s life.

When I got to the hospital, I learned that the prognosis was very poor. There she was, intubated and connected to multiple machines. I knew she never wanted that. It was up to me to make the decision to withdraw life support. Together with another Quaker who had helped as she was able, we were present when the doctors turned off the machines. Still unconscious, Sally was moved to hospice. She died as she had lived: alone. Tests in the ICU had shown that there was nothing physically wrong with her heart. The cause of death, her doctor said, was “broken heart” syndrome usually triggered by stress and grief.

Her story could have ended differently.