No One to Share our Hearts With

It was just two days after the horrible accident of January 23rd, the one that left the Dik children orphans that Beth Anne came to my office.  As we talked she expressed her anguish over the news of this horrible event.  Beth Anne is up in her 80’s and a resident at Bethesda Place.  As we talked, Beth Anne spoke of the two days following the accident is which she was so troubled by the news that she was unable to sleep.  She was concerned for the children, overwhelmed by their loss and beside her self with sympathetic grief.  One of the stresses she shared was just how difficult it was to have all these feelings and have no one to share them with.

“No one to share them with.”  What a sorry indictment of our culture.  She was referring to her late husband and the ongoing grief she lives with over his death and the resultant aloneness that she lives in.  But she was also speaking of the reality that so many of us live in; that of being surrounded by people but having nobody to talk to about those deep feelings that we experience.

Beth Anne is no stranger to loss, like so many of us, we know that to live is to lose, it is part of the package, it goes with the territory of life, it is unavoidable regardless of how unwanted it is.  Some losses seem so absolutely profound, so completely overwhelming that we question God and wonder who could ever survive, yet survive we do.  We also spent much of January transfixed in front of our televisions, overwhelmed by the destruction and need of the Haitian people.  Many of us responded, some of us are still responding, and we wish we could do more.  Even people my age ask the question, “I wonder if we should try to adopt one of those orphans and share with them a home and our love?”

No one to share our losses with; no one to pour our deep and anguished feelings out to; no one we feel comfortable enough with, safe enough with, that we believe cares enough for us to share those deepest and most profound feelings with.  What a shame!  But that shame belongs to us all for we are both at the same time responsible for the reality and impacted by the reality.

Beth Anne said further in the conversation that she had finally come to peace over the loss.  When I inquired how, she responded, “I prayed it though and finally the Lord gave me peace.”  Not everyone has experienced this kind of resolution; even many Christians struggle to find this kind of peace in the face of life’s losses, their own and others.  But it might be appropriate at this time to stop and consider Beth Anne’s astute observation, “No one to share them with.”

Now a casual observation of Beth Anne’s life shows that she lives in close proximity to 14 other individuals, there are always at least 4 staff members around and during the daytime that number doubles.  Just a few dozen feet from her door there is another group of 15 people.  The programming at Bethesda Place often finds people from the outside coming and going, school children, older adults, family visitors, church groups.  Sometimes Bethesda Place can be a very busy place, but we all know that having lots of other people around and lots of activity do not automatically dispel loneliness.
 
The real question we need to ask about Beth Anne and about ourselves is not how many people or how much activity is happening around us, but are there others around us who care for us sufficiently to be aware of our feelings, care about our feelings and who will then sit with us and give us the time we need to express our feelings.
 
There are some folks who have the capacity to express their feelings in genuine way quickly, articulately and with just about anybody.  I’m not one of those folks.  Most of us are much more reserved, trained to be so by family and culture and through sufficient painful experiences.  Many of us have never even learned to speak of our feelings with any kind of comfort or clarity.  I can remember one conversation I had with a therapist in which we were discussing this very issue in my life.  When asked how I was doing, I am given to saying, “Good” or “Not Bad” or “Lousy” or even “So so” but if that isn’t good enough, if you decide to ask what I mean, in the past I had a real hard time.  Not because I was resistant to being cared for, but because I had never developed an “emotional vocabulary” to describe my inner world.  Now I know, some of you are questioning that, especially since I seem to have lots of words for everything else.  But it was true and it is still a struggle.

One of the most surprising things about the work of chaplaincy is that people I don’t even know, that I only encounter briefly during a hospitalization, bear their souls to me, describing in powerful and wonderful detail what they are feeling.  Why?  The only answer that I can come up with is because the position carried with it an air of safety.  I am, after all, obliged to not share anything they say to me with anyone else.  This is not only a legal obligation, but an ethical, moral, spiritual and personal obligation.
 
In these encounters as people share their hearts with me, I have a privilege that even those they know best may never have, the privilege of seeing into their spirit and hearing their pain.  It is a privilege to provide a safe place for others to share the burdens of their souls without their being afraid that somehow the sharing will be used against them.  And Oh how sad it is that we don’t have another that we feel so safe with that we can without fear share the burdens and joys, anxieties and pleasures of our hearts.

But I must return to Beth Anne for a moment.  She found relief in prayer.  Her faith in the loving safety of her God allowed her to find peace from the anguish she felt for the Dik children in prayer.  If you have no one else to share your burdens with, I hope you have a relationship with God in which, like Beth Anne you feel absolutely safe, so that you might find that peace when your heart is burdened down by life.