The Mysterious Power of Neediness

Seen in the light of faith, our most painful shame can become the path on which we soar to sanctity.

BETHPAGE, TN (Catholic Online) - The only word that adequately described her was "crusty," and I will never forget what an implausible but profound teacher she was, the unlikely deliverer of one of the most mysterious admonitions of my life. She was a child of the 20's, my husband's great aunt and his grandmother's sister-in-law and best cohort.

Family tradition says Aunt Helen and Gracie got into all kinds of impropriety as young women, that is, until in Aunt Helen's words, Gracie "got religion" and quit wearing shorts and smoking. Black and whites show the two of them standing by classic cars in swim suits with cigarettes dangling from glamorous fingers, always painted ladies with trouble in their eyes.

Twice a widow, the two prevailing rumors about Aunt Helen were that she had gotten a little too wild in her heyday and was never able to have children, and that she was rich beyond imagining after outliving the Great Depression and two husbands.

She would harangue you in a heartbeat with an infantryman's vocabulary and a voice ragged from decades of smoking, so when her health declined and there was no husband or child to help care for her, it was with great trepidation that I and my four-year-old would make a day trip every month or so to clean her hermitage, shop for her, and take her to the doctor when she needed to go.

Because she was so cynical, I never allowed her to pay me, and looking back, I am so thankful I had at least that bit of real charity. I dreaded those trips with a passion, mostly because she had some of the coarsest manners I had ever witnessed in a female, young or old, and I was always afraid she would say something hurtful or scandalous in my young son's hearing.

But it was also because the air in her tiny house was cloying with cigarette smoke, almost thick enough to lean against, so that everyone and everything who spent any amount of time there had to be radiated for cancer and washed or fumigated upon leaving. The stale smoke hung in my hair and clothes in the car on the trip home, making any other endeavor of the day pretty unpleasant before a bath.

She lived an hour away and I considered it might be too much trouble to be bothered with since we were barely able to afford the gas, but there was really no one else in the family with the time during the day to help her, so I felt I was doing my Christian duty. I knew God would never be pleased if I didn't, and if I desired anything, it was to please Him.

At the same time, my church was undergoing a horrible split. Everyone had taken a side, and having been on the wrong side of another split in the same church years before, I knew how evil the insurrection against our pastor really was, because God had fiercely disciplined me for the same thing and taught me significantly about rebellion. They were in blatant sin, and it bothered me that God seemed to do nothing about it. I wanted him to throw thunderbolts from heaven and incinerate them with His gaze.

It was with this conflict broiling in my heart that I found myself at the foot of Aunt Helen's toilet, brutally scrubbing excrement out of her pink shag carpet. Fiercely independent and self-sufficient, she clung desperately to remaining in her home as long as possible, but it became increasingly difficult for her to get around, and she routinely had accidents while trying to make it to the restroom in time.

I know she detested that it was necessary for anyone to have to perform such a task for her. Everyone despises his own neediness and the weakness of others. It seems so pathetic. We avert our eyes and awareness in embarrassment, loathe to acknowledge it. Characteristic of her generation, she never asked me to clean it for her, and to save her the shame of her weakness and neediness I never mentioned when I did.

Instead, I fumed at the presumption and pride of those gossiping backbiters who were ripping apart God's beloved Church, and the angry action of scrubbing her carpet became something of a metaphor.

As I struggled, God laid a silent question on the altar of my heart, a challenge: Why was I was on my knees, sweating and scouring the foul carpet in front of me? Shocked, I did not have a ready answer, so I scrubbed and wondered. What was I doing? Why was I struggling with this disgusting work for a woman to whom I was only remotely related, and then only by marriage?

While the TV in the next room blared with court shows, the answer rolled over me the way my son drove toy cars up and down Aunt Helen's legs. In waves of penetrating astonishment I realized I was willing to invisibly clean refuse out of her carpet because I loved the crusty old woman in the next room who rarely had a nice thing to say, and I had fallen in love with her because in her weakness she really needed me.

I scrubbed in wonder, moved by the truth of it and how it could have happened that my reluctant service had led me to love Aunt Helen with a truly self-less love. My memory paraded the humor of playfully snatching a billowing sheet out of her feeble grasp when she repeatedly tried to help me make her bed, of the 20 year stash of presents under every bed and in every closet waiting to be re-gifted, of the rare peach colored iris from which I had finally talked her into allowing me to take a piece.

I scrubbed a little more zealously, giddy now with wanting to show her how much I loved her by making up for every trace of her weakness, and it was then that the Lord rammed the lesson home.

In a single piercing flash, I suddenly knew He felt the same way about those disgusting church members I longed to scrub out that I felt about Aunt Helen. I understood it was their profound weakness that moved Him to love them so desperately. I was aware that their need was such that only He could ever help them, and how tenderly He longed to do so, and to make up for every lack that provoked their incontinence. I saw and understood in a way that has never left me that mercy triumphs over judgment.

I wept at the foot of that toilet in the nauseatingly pink bathroom with the shiny silver swans on the wallpaper and the filthy shag carpet, like I had never wept before. It was His mercy that had brought me from the same sin they were in, corrected me, and placed me on the right path. It was His mercy that preserved a cynical Aunt Helen to a witness of His love, and it was His mercy that showed me how to love those church members and treat them with the charity for which they were created.

I was made aware in the deepest seat of my soul that the weakness in myself that I abhor so desperately, the weakness that provokes all my defenses and denial and pretension, the neediness I hide, is always what draws the Lord closest to me. Clinging to this knowledge, I am increasingly able to beg for grace whenever this weakness is triggered by a hateful "other" and I am suddenly called to control my own instinctive incontinence.

"Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who falls, and I am not indignant? '[His] power is made perfect in weakness.' I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." (2 Cor. 11:29-30, 12:9). Seen in this light, our most painful shame becomes the path on which we soar to sanctity. The crusty old woman and our nasty Christian sister and brother become the sweetest ally, our personal escorts to holiness.

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Sonja Corbitt is a Catholic Scripture teacher, study author and speaker. She is a contributing writer for Catholic Online. Visit her at www.pursuingthesummit.com and www.pursuingthesummit.blogspot.com.

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