An unexpected visit to the JR

 After 12 years I found myself doing something I had somehow thought I had found a way to avoid: I was headed to the JR in Oxford to get a medicine hard to find at 7pm on a regular weekday. Work took me to Spain last week and somehow, somewhere, from someone I caught a virus, which may or may not be a respiratory virus that is going around. I was thoroughly tested for covid and possible bacterial infection, x-rayed, etc, and the drs concluded: a virus that had exacerbated a long-dormant asthma.

In western society, getting help from someone has come to be seen as being a burden or bothering others. We have lost the capacity to realise that in being limited there will always be moments when we need help; some more pressing than others. As I rode in my friend's car with my housemate next to her I was struck by how God had brought me to this place and placed these two women in my life. Since moving to Oxford different circumstances have meant that I have found myself in the position of asking for help. That is not always easy, the world we live in in the west is made to lull us into the belief that we are totally independent and capable of doing everything on our own. This isn't just an ideology, the entire structure of this society allows for it. In developing countries, the weaker state infrastructure, greater economic precarity, and greater exposure to drastic climate problems (hurricanes, earthquakes) mean that people are more conscious of the need for each other. If family members and friends don't help each other out, survival might not be possible. I am not advocating for precarity rather I am wondering how can a society modernise, and provide greater financial and general life stability without losing the fabric of society: family and the connections that have traditionally arisen from the extended family structure. For some reason (there might be a history written about this) the greater economic and state stability found in western Europe has been coupled with a rapid decline of society, especially of people helping each other out ( nothing against foreign charity work but why do people find it hard to help their neighbour but not the unknown stranger millions of miles away?). Does it have to be this way? 

Prior to getting sick, I gave a talk on Catholic Social Teaching, and what allows it to cross political borders. I focused on the Catholic Anthropology that is at its roots. The phrase self-gift came up several times connected to the freedom for Love (God-given love) as part of the civilisation of love mentioned in Pope Benedict's Caritate in Veritate that we are called to build and live in our communities. Now the notion of self-gift can remain a theory with lack of clarity on how it should look in our everyday lives. This is especially true for those that are not married and those that do not have children. Giving yourself to your spouse and children is the most immediate example precisely because it is both the most immediate and material, and often the hardest to practice. It is this group of people that most people love the most but also the one in which people are most truly themselves, so our weaknesses are much more out in the open.  Giving yourself to people that truly know you can thus be harder than to a stranger. This may be the reason it is easier for people to give to charities with far-off beneficiaries than to help their neighbours when they are sick. The person million miles away is unlikely to irritate you with their early Sunday morning gardening. BUT it brings us to that topic of self-gift, to those of us who do not live with a spouse or do not have children the call to self-gift is sometimes less obvious and can remain difficult to pin down. Yet, we are surrounded by people we know, people that have been placed in our lives and us in theirs for reason. In this way. God is giving us a group of people to which we are called to give ourselves. Our co-workers, our housemates, and those annoying neighbours that vote against you in the neighbourhood council are the ones we are called to give of ourselves. Self-gift is a death to ourselves: a death to our desire to always do things when we want, as we want, and what we want and to sometimes abstain from this for the benefit of another. So my friends, my co-worker with her car and my housemate sacrificed themselves to take me to the drs, that was their self-gift. They may not have even thought about it in this way but as I sat there I wondered at God's providence and of His placing me here with them at this exact moment and realised that nothing is merely a coincidence. Not all acts of self-gift are big or crucial, often they are small, tiny things that maybe we don't think about at the time or realise the importance they may have for the other person.  Maybe if we practice it enough, and realise it enough, we become conscious of our interconnectedness, our need for each other, and self-gift to those God has placed by us but who are not as obvious as a family member might be will maybe become more natural, more of a second-nature thing. Maybe this would help to avoid the loss of social fabric present in an economically stable society, maybe that way we could bring about economic well-being that is not coupled with social disintegration. Maybe....