Why We Care About Safety

Here at the Old Place, we look out for each other.  One morning, I was taking my walk around the lake when I noticed Ms. Edith sitting on her back porch with a stranger.  It was a young man; his head was bent, he held a cup of coffee, and he was crying.  Edith got up, patted his back, and walked over to me.  The fella had recently lost his young bride to an act of violence, leaving him a widower at 28 and his 7-year-old daughter Teresa motherless.  All of a sudden, all my problems seemed like Disney World.  As I began to pray with them, the names Edith and Teresa kept coming to mind, and I wondered what God was trying to tell me.  I had been reading recently about a rather unique saint, a Prussian-born Jew and former atheist named Edith Stein.  Moved by the tragedies of World War I, Edith became a nursing assistant in a hospital.  Drawn to the Catholic faith, she was admitted as a Discalced Carmelite nun, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  Eight years later, she was martyred in a Nazi gas chamber.  God had chosen that moment of tragedy to show me, once again, why safety is a ministry.

Of course, safety is also the law.  The philosopher Aristotle said, “Law is reason free from passion.”  Does that mean that the law is a sufficient reason on its own to be safe?  I believe that rational arguments and inferences alone do not yield trustworthy knowledge.  Safety is about people.  Silly, emotional, passion-filled children of God.

As I reflected on the young man’s pain, I remembered St. Teresa saying, “Our knowledge of someone else’s pain is direct knowledge.” Say what?  Well, we know other people have a mind like ours, sure, because we know that we think, feel, decide, suffer, rejoice, etc.  Think of René Descartes’ phrase, “Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.”  We all have experiences influenced by the world outside our own bodies, but what makes those experiences interchangeable between us?

In his 1995 Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II, now St. John Paul the Great, clarified this when he wrote, “Recognizing the reality of a person as opposed to a mere human organism is as fundamental as recognizing the reality of being.”  In other words, recognize the soul in all persons.  So what’s it going to do with safety?

I must go back to St. Teresa for an answer.  The object of our awareness at first is awareness of a consciousness outside ourselves, let’s say one that “appears” to be in pain.  When we allow this awareness to unfold to its fullness, we find ourselves actually aware of becoming the other person, in a sense, “remembering” or “recognizing” their pain as if it were a memory in our own personal experience.  We achieve what amounts to intimate knowledge of others, a caring that transcends any desire to merely prevent pain but to eliminate it altogether.  The struggle for safety is a supreme act of virtue, and as St. Thomas Aquinas said, “nothing, except sin, is contrary to an act of virtue.”

Sitting in a rocker at the Old Place, I am Col. Jim.