Out of the many things we lack.

Last updated on: October 23, 2016 at 8:44 pm by Anne Carpenter

Out of the many things we lack. 2016-10-23T20:44:50-08:00 Anne Carpenter

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I have no memory of what it is like to be unaware of my own mortality. This – along with basically no recollection of high school – is one of the lack of experiences that divides me most sharply from my students. I don’t know what it is to be young and invincible. I never knew this feeling, not even when I was young like them. It divided me from my peers when I was their age. So I simply accept it about my students, accept that it is something about them that I do not understand.

I was born twelve weeks early and almost died. I suffered in hospitals as a small child. As a teenager. At a very young age, I understood the precariousness of my life. There is no memory, none at all, untouched by the awareness that death is really not so very far from any of us. That it is not so very far from me.

It made me a strange child, I think. I have these vivid memories of falling asleep to the sound of my heartbeat, hyper aware that it is just a piece of flesh, just a muscle that could give out at any moment. Or once I sat in a waiting room at some hospital, waiting for yet another scan, and I remember the nurses wheeled in a very sick old woman. The look on her face, the exhaustion and pain: I knew she was dying. I stared in her eyes and death stared back.

Strange child, so very aware of suffering and of death. It made me quite a serious teenager.

There are many such lacks of experience that alienate me from others. We all have these. To have any experience means, at least for the moment, not to have an infinity of others. The lack is admittedly severe in my case, since I had a youth and young adulthood filled with such immense illness and violence.

It has forced me to acquire a certain native compassion, since I will daily hear of experiences that I have no direct knowledge of at all. I can at least arrange my heart in such a way that it attends to how something felt to another person. I don’t know the experience, but I know my experience of the person in front of me. It requires a challenging degree of credulity, because it takes practice to pay attention like that.

The effort is strangely paradoxical, since I don’t trust people in the least. Everything in my life has taught me not to trust them. And yet – I work very hard to hear what they’re saying underneath their words. I work so hard to discover how it felt for them. How it felt to do this or that – how it felt to trust people at all. Since I don’t know.

There is so much that I don’t know.

Previous Post

September 30, 2016

Glory of the Lord, vol. I: "Introduction" (An Existential Introduction)

Next Post

October 29, 2016 Oh, how we wait for one another to know more than we do.

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month June 2018 May 2018 March 2018 August 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz