Increasingly, I am finding myself moved by efforts to humanize and dignify people in all their situations and forms. Perhaps it is the steady march of “AI” to seemingly every niche of our lives (every YouTube and podcast ad is for the newest AI enabled tools to supercharge your ability to turn profits for your boss’s boss’s boss), along with the deeply antagonistic approach to people that our national leadership take on nearly everything. Either way, there have been a few times recently when I have encountered people seeking humanity over power, over wealth, over convenience, and been moved by it.
Here are a few I highlight for your attention:
When Life Begins With Death, Plough
Veronika Kabas profiled a hospital in Vienna that provides palliative care to children born under the expectation that they will die at or shortly after birth. This is an option provided only by the heroic efforts of Sister Teresa Schlackl, a nun and the hospital’s Chief Ethics Officer. Her mission is to dignify the life of every child and parent with the option to carry a potentially non-viable pregnancy to birth and to spiritually and physically care for the child and parents. The couple featured in the story were urged by their doctor to terminate the pregnancy in the second trimester when significant brain abnormalities were detected. Determined to carry to term, they not only had a live birth but were able to take their daughter, Anna, home for nearly a year before she died. Johannes, Anna’s father, says, “The beautiful thing about our story is that for us, there are no unanswered questions. Anna’s story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” What a gift. A grace.
Sometimes I use the phrase “doing the Lord’s work” flippantly (a bad habit to get a laugh), but these folks are doing the Lord’s work in one of the most profound ways I can imagine. Treating the unborn (and their parents) as people to be cared for and heaving against the standard of “care” and the entire national medical establishment that would rather them not see the light of day.
Engineering at Home, Sara Hendren ( @ablerism ) and Caitrin Lynch
This is a website documenting the adaptive devices a woman named Cindy uses after medical complications that left her with significant physical disabilities in all four limbs. She was fitted with the latest of robotic prosthetics, but found that the devices that helped her the most were often much simpler, low-tech devices (often of her own design). Items like a high friction board that helps her hold a newspaper and turn the pages, or a small but strong handle to help her get in and out of her car.
The invention I found most moving though was a pen holder that allowed her to write by hand. Though proficient with voice-to-text typing, she had always been a card and letter writer and missed the personal touch of a hand-written note. A bit of leftover silicone with a hole to hold a pen at the correct angle was all she needed to write again. And remarkably, her handwriting is recognizably still hers as it was before her disability. This small piece of silicone gave her a piece of her personality back. She can send a note to a friend and they know from the writing on the envelope that it’s from her.
The manifesto is well worth reading.
The third is a personal experience; it happened a few years ago but I have thought about it many times since. Shortly after moving to South Carolina I was in a municipal office of some kind waiting to register something other. The kind of chore you have in spades when you’ve emigrated states and you just can’t wait to be done interfacing with the bureaucracy. An elderly Black woman was also waiting and greeted me with the most generous smile and kindness. We chatted a few minutes (I learned a lot about appropriate greetings and small talk from the church ladies in Baltimore). She just dripped goodness and grace. The kind of person who can only be described as spirit-filled. It was just a few moments, but it filled me with light. Right there in the Greenville county office complex.
Much later it struck me that this woman was old enough to have lived through several decades of the Jim Crow south and the years that followed it. She had, in all likelihood, experienced despicable things at the hands of people who looked a lot like me. She certainly has friends and family who did. But she didn’t treat me as them. She treated me like a person, going far above and beyond the normal conventions of public friendliness. And in so doing, helped me recognize her as a person with a history and complexity and a relationship to this state and country that is probably very different from my own. And yet here we were together, and from pure generosity of spirit, she made my day.