The pain of people who are a pain

  • thistle.jpgWith hap­pi­ness still on my mind, a line from “My Life in Christ” jumped out at me:

    The degrees of beat­i­tude and tor­ment in the next world will be dif­fer­ent [for each per­son]. This is proved by the present state of the souls of dif­fer­ent peo­ple or of the same man at dif­fer­ent times under dif­fer­ent con­di­tions. The more sim­ple, the bet­ter and more socia­ble the man is, the more blessed he inwardly is; the more deceit­ful, evil and self­ish he is, the more unhappy. The firmer a man’s faith and the stronger his love are, the more blessed he is; the weaker his faith and love are, the weaker, the worse he feels. Thus those who have lit­tle or no faith, those who hate their fel­low crea­tures, are the most unhappy of men. By this we can under­stand what future tor­ments will be.

    In our crowded and stressed world, we’re all bound to come in con­tact with a few really bad eggs. It would be great not to have to admit it, but some peo­ple are a real pain to be around. But in my expe­ri­ence, they’re also IN pain.

    Though those guys blun­der around like a tor­nado, seem­ing to go to extreme lengths to secure the best of every­thing for them­selves, they’re totally mis­er­able. In spite of their out­ra­geous pos­tur­ing and nasty lit­tle machi­na­tions at work and else­where, they have no peace. You wish they could stop act­ing the way they do, but as near as I can tell, those destruc­tive behav­iors are all that they think is keep­ing them from humil­i­a­tion and dis­as­ter. (It’s usu­ally the exact oppo­site, but this is impos­si­ble for them to believe.)

    I think of some­one I used to work with years ago who was retir­ing. She had been there for many years, but on her last day, another artist and I real­ized that none of her co-workers had orga­nized any sort of farewell for her. When we asked them, they couldn’t have been more neg­a­tive. The woman who was leav­ing — I’ll call her Ann — was such a toxic per­son to have around that all any­one wanted to say at her exit was “Good rid­dance,” with per­haps a cho­rus of “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” after the door was shut behind her.

    It’s not like I didn’t under­stand that sen­ti­ment. I haven’t met many peo­ple who went out of their way more reg­u­larly to say the worst thing, act in the most self-centered way and insure that an office was reduced always to the law of the jun­gle. Still, the other artist couldn’t bear to let her go like that, and so we took up a quick col­lec­tion and did as much over our lunch break as we could. We got some inex­pen­sive flow­ers, bought a card and forced peo­ple to write their good­byes in it. I had a pic­ture frame that I had bought and never used — I quickly stuck a bow on it, and we made our presentation.

    I was really pretty embar­rassed at how tawdry our effort seemed. It looked so lame that I steeled myself for Ann to respond with a vol­ley of her usual acid-tongued put-downs.

    But she didn’t.

    She cried.

    I felt really awful about that, and I’ve never for­got­ten it. Because I real­ize that our puny imi­ta­tion of appre­ci­a­tion and affec­tion was more than she ever got to see, and more than she could quite take in. I felt cer­tain right then that she was actu­ally — as Fr. John sug­gests — very unhappy most of the time.

    I’d like to report that she under­went a com­plete change, but of course she didn’t. You rarely get that kind of sat­is­fac­tion with peo­ple like that, and it’s part of Chris­t­ian matu­rity to go on with­out it, to remem­ber always that they were made in God’s image as we all are.

    I don’t always win this fight with myself. There are some peo­ple who are really annoy­ing, and there are some whose baser impulses (if left unchecked) can poi­son any group they’re part of. It doesn’t solve every­thing to know that they are suf­fer­ing in a way you may not be able to under­stand, but in my case, it helps me get a lit­tle closer to the way I want to act towards them. After all, most of their flaws wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t rec­og­nize them in myself.


    Related posts:

    1. C. S. Lewis on the love of God
    2. Peo­ple power
    3. The peo­ple speak to “DaVinci”
    4. And speak­ing of Harry Potter …
    5. When famous peo­ple fast

    August 24th, 2007 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • mama­ju­liana 08.24.2007

    —After all, most of their flaws wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t rec­og­nize them in myself.—

    AMEN! I see this about myself…when I start bark­ing about those that I work with. IT is so easy to com­plain that they are the ‘bad’ people—then I see the same thing in myself—

    Lord have mercy!

    Thank you for this post!

  • s-p

    A wise post. “Bad breath is bet­ter than no breath at all” sums up a LOT of dys­func­tional behav­ior. Every­one is look­ing for some­thing like a rela­tion­ship… if we as Chris­tians can’t be a good breath (read: Spirit) to some­one who is set­tling for far less, what good are we to the bro­ken world.

  • Grace

    I sup­pose what was sober­ing to me was both how insignif­i­cant my effort was and how close I came to not mak­ing it. That has to make me won­der how many times before or since I’ve been unwill­ing to extend myself for peo­ple I found unpleas­ant, and how much I missed out on by “play­ing it safe.”

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