Wildflowers in the valley

On my own messy journey of seeing the world and learning to love

You who know, and whose vast knowing
is born of poverty, abundance of poverty--

make it so the poor are no longer
despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about--
like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

-Rilke, The Book of Hours, Book III, Poem 19  

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Christ was born poor, but I was not. I grew up in a stable, white, middle-class family. We rubbed shoulders with people involved in work overseas and traveled ourselves, hearing often about global disasters and corruption, and the practical response of Christians. But I was ignorant of the myriad forms of darkness that lurked in my own neighborhood. Though a “meth house” darkened the almost impassable gravel road near our idyllic mountain home in North Carolina, it seemed remote, inconsequential. Whatever happened in that home seemed more like a legend, less like a reality, and I certainly passed judgment on “those people” in my ignorance.

I was homeschooled, benefitting from a proactive and challenging education due to the dedication of my parents and their understanding of their own limitations as educators. I was always involved in different activities that cost money and time— ballet classes, swim team, piano lessons, horseback riding, anatomy camps, speech clubs, etc. And while I am grateful for those opportunities, I have to acknowledge that part of the cost of those privileges (though I didn’t know it at the time) was that my engagement with people whose walk of life was significantly different from mine was very limited. After high school, I attended two private Christian colleges, both filled mostly with people from families similar to mine: stable, white, and middle-class. My experience of the world up until the age of 21 was homogenous. I don’t name that to label whether it was bad or good, but simply to say that it was.

In my first year as a nurse I experienced the rude awakening of coming into the “real world.” There is no hedge of protection from the human experience in the hospital, especially for a nurse. To be a nurse is to come into contact with layer after layer of untold suffering, and to keep stepping further into it. It is to find yourself at odds with people who are truly wicked— heath care providers who exploit their patients, family members who take advantage of the person lying in the bed, and all manner of people who want to use you because they see you as a powerless little girl. It is to stare into the face of hopelessness and death, and not look away. In that first year, my rose-colored glasses about a dreamy Florence Nightingale situation were forcibly removed, stomped on, and the remaining shards of glass flung hard into my face.

Don’t get me wrong— I loved walking with people in their suffering, I loved taking care of them, I loved using my brain and my heart and my body together in a sort of nameless wisdom (something AI will never be able to master) in order to meet and minister to my patients. Yet the darkness chipped away at me quickly, and within my first year the pendulum had swung from my idealistic dream of nursing into a deep exhaustion, cynicism, and rage.

On one particular day, I remember taking care of a patient who was actively enslaved to some form of substance addiction. Though I have no recollection of why he was in the hospital, I remember how he treated me. Nothing I did was right no matter how far backwards I bent over for him. He was rude and manipulative, complaining about everything, then acting like we were friends only to belittle me again. The emotional gymnastics were exhausting and infuriating. I just wanted to take care of people, and he wouldn’t even let me do that! I knew he would keep making the same decisions that landed him in my care in the first place once he was released, and I hated him for it. This person treated me like the scum of the earth, when in fact he was the scum of the earth. In my mind a thought struck like lightning: It would be better if he would just die.

As I was reflecting over the day later on, the reality of what had happened so deliberately in my heart descended heavily upon me. What really is the distance between a thought and an action? It’s not that far. If I could think literal murder, I could easily do it. If I called myself a Christian, I had to be honest about that reality. The words of Jesus resounded loudly in my mind: “You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder…. But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment.”¹

In my own narrative I had been the good guy and this horrible man had been the bad guy. But I realized that in the mind of God this guy and I were on the same miserable plane of enslavement. We were both using people and hating them; both trying to maintain our own facades of control; both self-righteous in our depravity; both wholly stained before the Holy One; and both holding in our bodies the same mysterious birthright of dignity as divine image bearers. Wrestling with the unknowns I had to admit that I had no clue what had set this man on the path to becoming as physically and psychologically ill as he was, and I had held no compassion for his long trajectory of numbing that had erupted from some deep chasm of unmet need.

In meditating on the unknowns of this human being, my repentance began to unfurl into compassion, and the descent of God into humanity began to put on skin in a fresh way: “He emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity.”² This God chose to get into the grit, to move experientially towards an impoverished people like this guy, like me. This love was not spineless or cute, but relentless, compassionate, other-worldly, strong. It hit me then that God really came for people who were impossible to love, and me being a nice person really didn’t convince him I was more lovable. Any performance of lovability was only convincing to me; he saw right through the facade.

“Two thistles,” Vincent van Gogh, 1888

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In Thomas Merton’s autobiography³ there is a section where he describes how one chaplain in his secondary school in England substituted the word “gentleman” for the word “charity” (or love) in his reading of 1 Corinthians 13, saying:

“‘One might go through this chapter of St. Paul and simply substitute the word ‘gentleman’ for ‘charity’ wherever it occurs. ‘If I talk with the tongues of men and of angels, and be not a gentleman, I become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal… A gentleman is patient, is kind; a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up…. A gentleman never falleth away’….’

And so it went. I will not accuse [the chaplain] of finishing the chapter with ‘Now there remain faith, hope and gentlemanliness, and the greatest of these is gentlemanliness…’ although it was the logical term of his reasoning.”

Initially I laughed when I read this section, but then quickly became disturbed by the reality that virtue signaling holds such sinister power over people who want to maintain a picture of control, including myself. This chaplain in the 1910’s believed gentlemanly “virtues” such as playing cricket according to the rules proved that he was filled with the Spirit. But this feeble notion of love holds no candle to the sun-bright paradox of humility and power embodied by the incarnate Christ. Merton went on to say:

“I think St Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by the soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.”

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When I look at the people Christ came to, it was not to the “gentlemen,” or to those who appeared to have their lives together. “It is not those who are healthy who need a doctor, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”⁴ Over my decade of nursing I have been privileged to walk alongside the sick in their weakest moments. Those who are wise know their need. They have the humility to receive my help, no matter how vulnerable or embarrassed they feel.

The same idea applies to the addicts I have worked with in the hospital, and who I now work with on the farm. They’re a rough bunch, but know their need. They’re beautiful people, “standing about— // like wildflowers, which have no where else to grow.” Some of them have spent decades in prison. Some have children in foster care. Some of them have had to raise themselves from childhood. And right now they’re all choosing the hard work of naming their need and working towards recovery. It is poverty of spirit to walk daily in such humility and transparency. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.”⁵

All of these people— so many of whom are powerless and voiceless— have been teaching me. I hope I am wise enough to listen, to follow their example, to reject the facade, to embrace my own poverty, and learn what it is to love.

"Let me learn by paradox
that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart, 
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision."

-from The Valley of Vision

1. Matthew 5:22-23 CSB

2. Philippians 2:7 CSB

3. “The Seven Storey Mountain,” by Thomas Merton

4. Luke 5:31-32 CSB

5. Matthew 5:3 CSB