“I HAVE A HEART FOR…”
Ernesto Vasquez, MD
September 15, 2020
NCC’s academic year was inaugurated on September 14 with a symposium on the similarities and differences of some of the helping professions and on the centrality of networking among all of us. It was for me a WATERSHED EVENT.
I proposed perhaps the obvious, that what unite us helping professionals is an understanding of human nature—the “I have a heart for” the struggling other— and a sense of calling anointed by the holy spirit to try to mitigate suffering and to promote well-being.
The type of understanding of human nature that was most helpful in my endeavor to engage the suffering stranger in my psychotherapy practice can perhaps be called a ‘functional understanding’.
It is a psychological understanding I believe to be compatible with aspects of the Christian theological conception of human nature. Part of what I feel a calling for is to bring holistic forms of psychology and theology into conversation with one another.
In general terms, both theologically and psychologically, human suffering and well-being can be understood in terms of disconnection from and re-connection or re-attunement to life-sources, that is, God and commonly God-through-others.
Human nature is that which distinguishes humans from other species and grounds the meaning for a good life (in Christian terms, the sanctified life) for humans.
The organizing principle of the LIFE-GROUNDED or GOD-THROUGH OTHERS conception of human nature is that the development , according to our unique talents and interests, of our psychological relational—emotional, intellectual, biological, and spiritual—capabilities, is the intrinsically valuable foundation of a good and just society.
These God-given capabilities include as well the ability to form a religious faith, and the integrity-enhancing and integrity-restoring abilities of ethical and spiritual life.
JUST SOCIAL CONDITIONS are required for this development.Well-being here refers to those social conditions in which those capacities can be unfolded in their widest possible scope.
IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT, this fuller human development is, I believe, what God intends us to be and do.
From this perspective, UNJUST societies are those where human beings, whatever their particular identity, are deprived of those resources they need as material conditions for the unimpeded development of their defining capabilities.
A GOOD AND JUST SOCIETY is organized around the principle of the satisfaction of the material conditions necessary for untrammeled development, functioning, and self-determination of its people.
In its most general conception, HUMAN SUFFERING arises from the deprivation of the needed resources for the ongoing development, maintenance, and functioning of our God-given defining capabilities.
To trammel our self-active nature, therefore, is the fundamental form of harm because it denies, represses, or destroys just that which makes life valuable for human beings, principally our sense of viable connection to God and to others.
OPPRESSION is perhaps best understood as socially structured deprivation of the resources any group needs to develop and maintain its defining capacities and functioning.
The more a group is deprived of need-satisfying resources, the more it is oppressed.
A clear example of this is the EGREGIOUS MASSIVE RESOURCE DEPRIVATION of the population by the authorities to cope with the COVID-19 phenomenon which has inflicted untold suffering globally, and is to be condemned.
SIMULTANEOUSLY, 12 of the owners of the world have become wealthier that ever, now jointly possessing 1.015 TRILLION DOLLARS.
This is the type of injustice that, I believe, JESUS CHRIST THROUGHOUT HIS MINISTRY STOOD UP AGAINST.
The fact that there is a provident God does not mean that injustice is not to be denounced condemned.