Social Work; Essays on the Meeting Ground of Doctor and Social Worker

by Richard C. Cabot

All that death, that suffering, that destruction, are we worth all that? One certainly could see a tragic aspect to this question if one were so minded. Many philosophers have so seen it. But the answer depends, I think, on what we do with that energy. It may easily be wasted. It may just run through us, as much of our information runs through us, uncaught, unused, sacrificed for us, and nothing come of it. But it may be used right.

When we come to think of our mental energies, are we any less incurably borrowers, incurably indebted to the universe, incurably wasters except in so far as we make use of what we borrow? Anybody who has not studied how the child learns to talk, does not realize what a borrowing the simplest acts of language are, what imitators we are from the earliest moments of our lives. And if we try to think back to the pieces out of which we have been actually made, our intellectual, moral, spiritual life, we could take ourselves apart like a piece of machinery and say where each piece came from. If we look into the generation of our own minds I think we shall be overcome with wonder as I often have been, by the consideration of how little there is left that is us if we take out what has been given us. I can say from whom every idea I have had came, from whom I had it as a free gift. I believe the greatest of all our borrowings are from people we never saw, from books, from music, from art, from personalities to whom we feel inexpressibly near although we never saw them in the flesh.

Our spiritual borrowings are not only from sources such as I have mentioned, but from impersonal sources also, from beauty, from nature, that does not speak to us through any man. I have seen a hepatica on a rocky hillside under brown oak leaves, the sight of which made me conscious that I could never pay off my debts for life. I have heard a thrush singing in the early morning in wet dark woods, and known then and there that after the gift of that song I could never get even with the universe.

Most of us have had that sort of experience many times; it goes on and on piling up our debt. But our obligation grows and grows when we think of our country, of the traditions of our race, and of what has been given us by the church or university or family in which we have found ourselves without our doing anything about it. What should we be without those? What shred of personality would remain? I do not think the figure of the body, as I have tried to describe its borrowings, is any more striking than that of the mind, the spirit, and the inexhaustible debts that it has laid up.

All this energy poured into us from the material and from the spiritual universe around us accumulates in us. It accumulates bodily in vital force, zest, animal spirits, or "pep"; the desire to shout and sing or jump or slap somebody on the back. That is the vital side of our unexpended borrowings, the bodily expression of the fact that we have received more than we can easily take care of. But mental energy accumulates too; and the sense of its pressure is expressed in what seems to me the greatest word in our language—gratitude. Gratitude is "happiness doubled by wonder," happiness such as anybody may contain almost unconsciously or may let out of him, if he is thoughtful, in action sprung from conscious gratitude. Gratitude seems to me ultimately the motive of social work. We find in ourselves this painful head of energy—to me often painful. The sense of an animal caged, of a dog in leash, is the figure that most often comes to me as I am aware of what has been given to me and of how little I have paid it back. The extra flood of physical energy which any healthy human being or animal has, is paralleled in this tension of gratitude for all the gifts which we have not properly handed back, have not passed on, and never shall.

The attempt to pay out, to pass on, this energy naturally divides itself up according to the ways in which we have received it. We have received the physical bounty of life. We know how good it is to get water when we are thirsty and food when we are hungry, and along with the full-flavored awareness of this good we feel the pain of not being able to share it as swiftly as we would like to share it, as fully as we would like to share it, with people who have not got what we have. We call that pity, the sense of kind. I think of it as the sense of a common need. Other people are such as we. We are painfully aware of what has been given to us, and how much we and everybody else need it, and how little we deserve it. We are eager therefore to pass that on in any such form as it can be received. We are grateful for any good chance to pass it on. A homely but true image is that of the nursing mother. The baby needs milk and the mother needs to get rid of that milk. It is a painful pressure in her breast and a pressing need in her child. The two needs meet and satisfy each other.

We are just as eager, I think, to give back in kind all the different sorts of delight and of beauty for which we are grateful. But we have not well expressed this eagerness. I have dwelt already on the great lack of beauty and of art in social work, on its ugliness and drabness, and on the care-worn look in the social worker's face. But no one who is vividly conscious of the gifts of beauty which have come into his own life can continue to make his attempts at social work as unbeautiful as they have been hitherto.

If we have any sense of gratitude to the people that have cared for us, we want to pass on affection. We know the affection that was our physical creation in the beginning and our upbringing through childhood and youth, yet most of us have never tried through most of our lives to pay back these debts to our parents. Indeed we usually do not become aware of those debts until it is too late. To know that would bring us to almost insupportable remorse after our parents have left us, if we were not aware that we could pay over to somebody else the affection and care which they once lavished on us.

As we know that the physical energies of water and oxygen and carbon, of the food, the lime salts, and whatever else goes to make up our physical being, all come out of one source, so we are aware that all spiritual gifts come out of one and the same source. To be vividly aware of that, to stop and face the facts, to stop and take a view of where we are, tells us what next to do. It makes us eager to pay back some of that gratitude directly in prayer, and also indirectly through all the way stations by which this help has come to us. If you want to please a mother you do something for her children. A human being lives in his children, in the people or the undertakings that are his children literally or figuratively. If you love him, you feed his lambs. So we get the impulse to pass on the best fruits of life, first to the one source of all that makes us grateful, and then to the children of this central Energy, the different way stations from which it has come to us.

We eat our heads off like stabled horses with too much oats, if we do not get a chance to give away some of what has come to us. A man who tells funny stories is always grateful to the man who will listen to him. The same principle holds true all the way from story-telling to social work. It can be taken as humiliating, but properly viewed it is a sanifying and humbling fact.