Learning to Care and Not to Care
Temperance and T.S. Eliot
As we enter war with Iran, as AI companies make deals with the “Department of War,” as people we know suffer loss and pain, and as we ourselves face difficulties, we all must learn how to care rightly. Recently I wrote about the importance of not trying to save everyone and everything. But that still leaves the problem of caring, of our emotional and mental rumination spent on the concerns of the world and our lives. We too often worry about the future or regret the past because we care too much. The etymology of “care” comes from the Old English caru meaning “sorrow, anxiety, or grief.” We are “anxious” about the world or even our personal lives because we don’t know how things will turn out, we feel personally responsible, or we feel helpless. We “sorrow” over past mistakes or future possibilities that could harm ourselves, those we love, or even those across the globe. Which can lead us into caring too much, to inordinate, intemperate caring, where we take on the role of God and assume that it is our duty to control the safety of the world. This burden is crushing and despairing. What I’d like to offer today is an alternative, voiced by T.S. Eliot in his great poem, “Ash Wednesday” and in the 46th Psalm. Our duty is paradoxically to care and not to care. To “be still and know” that he is God. When we learn to do this, we don’t abandon our responsibility to love our neighbor, but we rightly (temperately) accept our limits before God.
