There’s a CVS with a low fiberglass paneled ceiling that sits in the middle of the aging storefronts snug against the sidewalk at the center of my neighborhood. A guy sits outside everyday, neatly dressed and clean. Occasionally he’s panhandling but more often he’s just out there chatting with a couple other regulars who hang outside the pharmacy doors. I don’t know his name. I gave him a slice of pizza out of a box I was carrying home a couple years ago but mostly just slip by with a smile and a nod.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in line at the pharmacy lately. Raising babies and toddlers is, in my low sample size of experiences, a game of waiting for the inevitable health issue. They fall somewhere on a spectrum between annoyance and crisis, both of which rip the thin veneer of put-togetherness you’ve fought to curate for the past couple of weeks since the last round. Once someone falls sick, hold your breathe because you’re about to be the next victim. So back to the pharmacy lines I go.1
I’m trying to stay off my phone but mostly I don’t. As I got closer to the front of the line, the third NBA article saying the same things grew less interesting than a conversation cranked to the volume of Broken Hearing Aid. A bent older woman and the overworked pharmacist were in a vigorous discussion. She was clearly a regular and chatted with the pharmacist by his first name, Carlos. Like me, her calls hadn’t been getting through. She and Carlos were both fed up with the corporate office’s inexcusable support and staffing, and she was devastated to hear he was transferring. Carlos shared her exasperation. He simply had to leave, he told her, in order to force the company’s hand to take this store seriously.
It was about that time I started realizing how long the line was behind me was. Unburying myself from my phone for a couple of moments, I started watching how Carlos and his team were working with a frantic efficiency but could not dig themselves out of the brokenness of their linoleum and fluorescent bureaucracy.2 Without the older woman shouting out her corporate frustrations and personable empathy, I would have breezed by another group of nameless people, doing their nameless tasks—just mildly annoying sources of my waiting.
As my turn came and Carlos flew through the work of solving my particular problem, I found myself looking back at the line. I discovered I was among a gathering that failed to recognize itself as such. Each person’s presence was the effect of some invisible difficulty. We arrived in this collective space of waiting because this place promised to offers something to relieve our private pain. We had come, quite literally, to receive balms for our suffering. We, the gathered suffering, bare inches between our lined up bodies, neither speaking nor looking. Just swiping through our phones.
There’s a haunting moment in Anna Karenina that captures this irony: the endless depth of every person’s life and the tragic shallowness with which we so often encounter one another.
Alexie Vronsky is boarding a train in pursuit of his infatuation.
Vronsky did not even try to fall asleep all that night. He sat in his seat, now staring straight ahead of him, now looking over the people going in and out, and if he had struck and troubled strangers before by his air of imperturbable calm, he now seemed still more proud and self-sufficient. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man across from him, who served on the circuit court, came to hate him for that look. The young man lit a cigarette of his, tried talking to him, and even jostled him, to let him feel that he was not a thing but a human being, but Vronsky went on looking at him as at a lamppost, and the young man grimaced, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the pressure of this nonrecognition of himself as a human being and was unable to fall asleep because of it.3
The young man on the train is not even a minor character. Simply someone who enters the set to reveal something of the nature of a main character. A face glimpsed in a passing vehicle on the highway through two pains of glass. The rustling jacket of the stranger waiting in the pharmacy line behind you. And yet Tolstoy breathes humanity through him. The writer allows us to peer down into the depth dimension of this lonely young man’s soul, even for the brief instant he passes through the frame of Vronsky’s life, and encounter the shocking psychological dismemberment a careless stranger is capable of inflicting on another.4
A couple hundred pages on, Tolstoy unpacks Vronsky’s blinder-ed ethical vision more explicitly. “Every man,” he tells us, “knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is. So it seemed to Vronsky.”5
Our minds seem defaulted to presume that we are unique among humans in the level of difficulty we face. Surely, we say to ourselves, my behaviors are reasonable and excusable in a way the actions of others are not?
For at least the past five years, probably much longer, I’ve been learning and forgetting and relearning and re-forgetting the cliche that, indeed, everyone is fighting a great battle about which we know nothing. I’ve been trying to remember that if this is true, then kindness, grace, and compassion really are the most sensible ways to relate to everyone: whether stranger, friend, colleague or spouse. But I keep forgetting.
Richard Rohr recently shared on a podcast how in retirement he’s been spending a lot of time just looking. He shared that, even at this advanced stage in the life of a contemporary mystic, this practice of looking was changing him. He realized he was evolving from an eyes-closed contemplative practice toward an eyes-open practice. And it seemed like it was beginning to occur to him that this was a profound and perhaps event paradigmatic transformation: from looking within and blocking out the world in order to meet God, to looking at the world deeply and compassionately as the field where we encounter God’s continuous creative self-revealing unfolding. Rohr spoke of the difference between ways of looking. The difference between a glare, a glance, and a gaze. He found that as he finally slowed down he was really learning how to gaze — and discovering how much that kind of present attention toward the world and everyone in it has to do with practicing genuine love.
I’ve been forgetting all of this a lot lately, to be honest. Last year (and bleeding into this one) found me doing a lot of glaring. Like Vronsky, people were becoming lampposts to me—and they were in my way.
When communication broke down at work in ways I perceived harmful, I would forget the overload everyone was carrying, the constant trauma of Ukraine, Israel and Palestine present to some of my coworkers with family in those places, the struggles at home that were clouding their minds when they tried to show up to meetings, and the hundreds of struggles, joys, and complexities to which I will never be privy. When annoying Boston drivers cut me off on my way to pick up my daughter, I would flip them the bird (ok, I would only do it in my mind — I’m still way too country Texan to ever actually do that…but I felt like it!). And let’s be honest. Somehow I fall from compassionate gazes back to judgmental glares literally every day with my wife, even though I should know and empathize with what’s straining her every fiber better than anyone.
All of this leads me to Thomas Merton’s second conversion. He describes it in an iconic passage from the collection of reflections written in the late 1950s and early 1960s called Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. It was his conversion back to the incarnate world, to the mysticism of everyday life and the image of God present not just in inner silence but in the cacophonous bustling faces of urban strangers.
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all of those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.6
Meditating with awe on his epiphany, Merton goes on to exclaim:
I have the immense joy of being [human], a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realized what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.7
I remembered this passage as I was writing this piece, but I forget how to live what Merton is saying every day. I am continually in need of the conversion he describes. Like Vronsky, life keeps dragging me back toward mindlessness, self-absorption, and failing attempts at self-sufficiency.
The whole point of cultivating inward silence and solitude where we encounter the presence of God is, as should be so obvious, not to forget the world but to love the world. Our inward security in love becomes the ground through which we become present to the other in all their creaturely frailty and beautiful. Paradoxically, solidarity requires less that we grow hard enough to face and fight evil. Rather it invites us to just grow tender enough to pick our heads up from our phones so we can listen to and be moved to action by the honest truth of another’s life.
I sketched the first draft of this back in March or April of 2023 (when I was on paternity leave and actively reading Karenina). When I decided I wanted to pick this essay idea back up a couple weeks ago, I didn’t know that I would once again have two very sick kids at home without childcare for most of the week during the time I planned to actually sit down and finish the writing/publishing. Time is a circle.
Did you know CVS Health was the 6th largest corporation by revenue in America in 2023? True story. I hope they thanked Carlos and his overworked team for last year’s 10.4% revenue growth, made possible thanks to understaffing our local pharmacy.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Penguin Classics, Deluxe Edition (2000). Pg 104.
I’ve fallen in love with Tolstoy’s writing because of this quality: his ability to unpack the layered, contradictory, and quickly shifting inner worlds of his characters with such intimacy and empathy. But Tolstoy’s capacity to imagine the full humanity of others has real limitations. The spectrum of desires and emotions his female characters express are clearly circumscribed, even for someone as complex as Anna. At least in the two major novels of his I’ve read, his portrayal of serfs has that tendency of upper-class progressives to reduce the poor to either one-dimensionality, or portray them with a sort of submerged consciousness that is more acted upon by the flow of the world than as people with their own agency and critical-historical awareness, or, as a kind of mirror to the previous, he at times idealizes them as the happiest of peoples living as humans were meant (this shows up particularly at points in Karenina through the protagonist Levin).
Karenina, 302.
Merton, Conjectures, 153-154
Conjectures, 154-155
I come back to that Merton quote from time to time 🤍 and I love that “open eyed” contemplation. Beautiful. I sympathize with the sick kids, and it’s snow days throwing off the rhythm at our house these days.