Everyone Is Eventually a Burden

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I got 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.

In many expressions of politeness in our culture, it is expected that we will be somewhat dishonest, and in some instances, we consider truthfulness impolite. When a friend has inconvenienced us, it is expected that we insist, “It’s no problem!” When someone takes us to a business lunch, even though it is customary for the one who did the inviting to pay, the invited is still expected to offer – knowing full well the offer is only a gesture.

The gentle untruths of polite behavior serve as a social lubricant, protecting our relationships from wear and tear. Politeness buffers us from the friction of day-to-day life with other people. And that buffering is precisely why effective pastoral care often requires impoliteness: the pastoral caregiver must deal with real life, in complete truthfulness, with precise attention to those aspects of life where there is resistance, which is to say, where there is friction. That is the only way to touch the soul. The polite easing of friction is antithetical to pastoral work.

My failure with Jens – with whom, it should be acknowledged, I was not officially in a pastoral relationship – was that he exposed his soul in a sense, and by my politeness I declined his implicit request for care.

I share this experience with Jens because I have been mulling over a parenting challenge, and I think the way I let Jens down that day points to a solution. As I have seen the slow advance of laws permitting medically assisted death, I have begun wondering how I can raise my children to grow into the sorts of people who would rather choose to endure the painful, humiliating loss of health and bodily function than to die by suicide. I believe that part of the answer to this parenting challenge is found by examining the problem of polite dishonesty when it comes to the ways we burden and are burdened by one another. These two experiences – being a burden and being burdened – are not the same, but for any who will resist the seduction of suicide as an escape from the reality that human life is burdensome, being a burden and bearing burdens must be taught and practiced. And I believe the first step is overcoming the polite dishonesty that denies people are burdens at all.

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.

During my time in Clinical Pastoral Education many years ago, I sat in a hospital room with a woman in her late seventies who had suffered and survived a heart attack. Rather than feeling grateful she was still alive, she was distressed and anxious. She confessed that she wished she had died because she felt burdensome to her adult niece, the only relative she had who could care for her. When I spoke with her niece, she was polite and wouldn’t engage beyond vague niceties when I tried to ask her about the challenges of caring for her aunt. She was not willing to speak candidly about the complex challenges of caring for an elderly relative.

Photograph by Bruno Aguirre / Unsplash.

At that time, I was already fiercely opposed to physician-assisted suicide because of moral principles, but that day I saw a snapshot of the pernicious pressure people would feel if medical suicide were available to them: insistently told they are not burdens, they would know implicitly that they would be expected to reciprocate with their own untruth, that is,  expected to say they were tired of living and were ready to die with dignity. Had the elderly woman I visited been given the choice to end her life, I suspect she would have dutifully accepted, going out of her way to emphasize that she was finished with life. Assisted suicide is what happens when we apply the rules of politeness to taking life.

While I believe medical assistance in dying is morally wrong and should not be legalized, I  confess that I am pessimistic about winning this fight legally and culturally. Rather, I expect a progressive conception of bodily autonomy to win the day, in keeping with the general trajectory of law regarding the rights to abortion, medical interventions to support transgender identification, and recreational drug use. Add to that trajectory the sobering fact of a low birthrate, which will result in labor shortages in a few decades, especially in professions like elder care. Medical assistance in dying might be used to relieve an overburdened healthcare system. My guess is that we will hear more and more of assisted death, not only as an act of compassion for the suffering, but as a courageous act of social and ecological responsibility by older generations who care about younger generations.

Given the possibility of this grim future, I find myself puzzling over how I can raise my children to be able to withstand the subtle but powerful coercive pressures to kill themselves when they become old or seriously ill. It strikes me that this might serve as a basic test of faith formation, whether the Christians we raise will be able to resist the seductive power of polite suicide.

When I first put this question to myself, my gut response was to turn to the concept of virtue – that fortitude or courage or patience might be what is lacking in our culture, and that Christians who have developed these virtues would be less likely to take their own lives. But I am mindful that Christians share the tradition of virtue ethics with the ancient Stoics, for whom the willingness to take one’s own life was an expression of perfection in virtue and detachment from the fleeting things of this world. Indeed, a cursory skim through world history quickly shows that virtues like courage or patience have often been inculcated in the same cultures where suicide was treated as normal.

It is a feature of biblical religion generally, and Christianity specifically, to insist that every human life has infinite worth. A culture that embraces the idea that some lives are no longer dignified or worth living is not necessarily one that lacks virtue, but it is one that has become post-Christian. Moreover, the element of Christianity that has been lost is not necessarily kindness or compassion, but the biblical recognition that to be human is to be a burden, and that human flourishing therefore requires that we learn to be burdens and learn to bear burdens.

One of the odd details in the Gospel accounts of Jesus sending out his disciples to preach is that he instructs them to rely on the people they are sent to:

Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, “Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” I tell you, on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town. (Luke 10:4–12)

In contrast to what Christians may now think of as missionary work – the wealthy bringing their resources to the poor – Jesus sends his disciples out into the world as burdens, requiring hospitality. It is easy to imagine the alternative, that the same Lord who fed multitudes would send out his emissaries with material goods as signs of the coming kingdom of God, or that he would instruct his disciples not to burden the people to whom they were ministering. In fact, the apostle Paul adopts this approach to his ministry, becoming the original “bivocational” minister of the gospel, and frequently reminding people that he went out of his way not to burden them. But Paul’s approach is the exception, not the rule. Jesus establishes the norm, sending his disciples – in Matthew’s Gospel, the twelve, and in Luke’s Gospel, the seventy-two – with the expectation that “the laborer deserves to be paid.”

We need only remember that these laborers were not invited, but simply showed up. The unexpected imposition is a central feature of the gift that Jesus’ disciples bring on their mission. Jesus sends the disciples to perform signs as a manifestation of God’s kingdom, which by their presence will have “come near.” These signs, the most visible of which is to cure the sick, expose the disorder of the present age and the coming restoration of creation. But unlike that of the body, the sickness that puts the human soul in disorder is its inhospitality, to God and to our neighbors. Those who found a way to welcome these strangers from the Lord into their homes would receive this healing of soul: “…your peace will rest on that person.” By contrast, those towns which refused to welcome the Lord’s messengers would be guilty of the sin of Sodom, which was not only sexual assault but “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease,” that it “did not aid the poor and needy” (Ezek. 16:49).

To receive the kingdom of God was to open oneself to carrying the burden of others. This principle outlasted Jesus’ earthly ministry and carried into the teaching of the New Testament. The apostle Paul urges thieves to “give up stealing; rather, let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy” (Eph. 4:28). They are not told to work in order to care for themselves, but to bear the burden of the needy. As for the church, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this” (1 Cor. 12:22b–24a). The Christian life requires people to “bear one another’s burdens” in order to “fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2), and just as the command to love one’s neighbor sums up the whole law (Gal. 5:14), we may say that to love your neighbor is to bear your neighbor’s burdens. In contemporary theological and ethical discourse, there is no shortage of talk of dependence and vulnerability: we need only observe that these describe facts of the human condition, which means that being involved with humans means taking on the vulnerable and dependent – bearing burdens.

It is profoundly uncomfortable to be a burden and to admit to having been burdened. A relative recently observed that people now rarely respond with “you’re welcome” when they are thanked, preferring instead, “No problem,” or, “Of course.” I do it myself. It is as though the plainspoken admission of having done something for another person by saying “you’re welcome” is too uncomfortable. These interactions have become yet another instance of politeness as gentle dishonesty, avoiding even the minimal friction of acknowledging that a service has been rendered, of confirming that, yes, you were owed gratitude.

The slight discomfort we might feel in these casual interactions deserves our attention; these are symptoms of something deeper than colloquial habit. As I said, the areas of friction are the access points we have to our souls. And it seems to me that our souls have come to find intolerable any burdensomeness – whether our own or other people’s. But that means we have become intolerant of the human condition. It cannot be a surprise, then, that there is increasing demand for permission to eradicate this condition. In so doing, we miss the opportunity for our polite avoidance of friction to be transformed into loving regard for the honesty and vulnerability of others, so that our expressions of gratitude or generosity are sincere and extend an invitation to deeper relationships in which we really can carry one another’s burdens.

In a culture where polite suicide may soon be seen as normal, the people who will have the strength to resist the social pressure to kill themselves will be the ones who, among many other things, have also learned to be comfortable being a burden and comfortable with the reality that loving other people means being burdened by them. Christians who hope to raise children whose bodies and souls can survive this culture must teach their children that there is nothing wrong with being a burden; we must prepare our children to expect to care for us like we once cared for them; we must model what it looks like to bear the burdens of others and to be truthful about how difficult and demanding this kind of Christian love can be. This sort of parental effort begins with the kinds of impolite interactions Jens invited me into, who thereby offered me the chance to be Christian in this difficult, necessary, gracious, and morally serious way.

This moral commitment will also be the key to Christian mission in a culture that is inhospitable to burdensome people. The apostolic witness to God’s coming kingdom and the pastoral care that the Christian must offer the post-Christian society is to be a burden and to receive others’ burdens. The same Jesus who sent his disciples to towns without belt or money sends us into our world in witness to the kingdom, and we too must manifest that kingdom by offering the Lord’s peace to those who will take us in when we cannot care for ourselves. In this way, the persistent presence of our ailing, suicide-eligible bodies will be, in God’s ironic providence, the means by which he will offer salvation for souls.