Jesus is talking to commoners knowing rulers “insult and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you.” But Jesus tells them, “You are the salt of the earth.”
Salt is essential for life and it is Jesus’ description for people made to feel inessential. Essential means “to be” and highlights the core goodness of our being. Essential became a particular designation during the initial stages of Covid. Some people were designated as “essential workers.” Oddly enough, the designation of essential for life was made by the most inessential, in fact deadly, of organizations, the military. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified “essential workers are those who conduct a range of operations and services that are typically essential to continue critical infrastructure operations.” But it is the military’s murderous deadliness, including its lethal draining of resources, material and financial, that make for the unrelenting strain on and depletion of workers who are essential for life. For the length of human history, people have labored with compassion and courage to share love and to respect the dignity of people who are vulnerable, acting as caregivers for people who are disabled, elderly, children. These same people provided the same essential witness during Covid. Nurses were especially noted. Their ability to be essential workers became a struggle, jeopardized by physical, material, and financial deprivations. Their struggle was associated with sacrifice; the blood offering of a life,” killing – themselves. Another designation was thus applied, hero. The hero designation is usually reserved for men who take life, and in killing and being killed are held up for worship. Hero began to be applied to women who have always given life but have not been held up for worship for doing so. They became designated heroes, in association with sacrifice. It was as if nurses became soldiers, captains of a battleship fighting an enemy. As captains are expected to go down with their ship, so too nurses. But like on a battlefield, the circumstance in hospitals was a manufactured one. Manufactured by inessential plunderers like those who ignored the novel coronaviruses handbook, disbanded its authoring team, and looted its funds. The manufacturing of scarcity and death has long been normalized in this military empire. It is currently reaching alarming rates in the vitally essential mission of health care and nurses are acting not as soldiers but as – salt. Nurses are experiencing that others will “insult and persecute you and utter every kind of slander against you” specifically because they are acting as vital , essential for life – salt. In their defiance of death, so much of it unnecessary, nurses are no longer having the title, hero, applied. For nurses are quite unlike soldiers. Soldiers are diminished of conscience, trained into subordinate silence so they will kill on command for the sake of war plunderers. Nurses will not be diminished of conscience, nor trained into subordinate silence allowing people to die on account of health care plunderers. Nurses are speaking out and acting out as essential caregivers. Nurses are essential in highlighting health care executives taking individual millions from profits while nurses receive scant salary increases; highlighting government money used for executive bonuses but not for masks and PPE; highlighting funds, time, and attention used for diversifying executive stock portfolios, lobbying for Medicare kickbacks, and cost cutting staffing practices but not for nurse hirings nor retention care, nor skill development, training, and education for nurses to maintain essential professional expertise. Inessential executives are responsible for insulting and persecuting nurses, patients, and the common good. Their plundering of the health care system is causing staffing shortages, equipment malfunctioning, and thus patient suffering and death. Rather than accurately report these truths, media too are insulting and persecuting nurses. Recent nursing strikes to change this plundering and save patients from suffering and death has nurses depicted in the media as greedy and uncaring, especially as a union. Media prove the hero designation was temporary. It never did refer to essential life-givers like nurses. Why haven’t these workers for life always been our heroes? Why will they not reman so? It seems this empire prefers our being silent soldiers rather than boisterous healers. Nurses are enduring incredible moral distress every day at the bedside of human beings for whom they are committed to give care but are being denied the essential respect, time, and resources to do so. Nurses are witnessing to us the difference between the people whom a deadly militant empire use as essential heroes and those people who really are essential heroes. Nurses deserve work and social environments that are wholly centered on people, abundant with provisions, and spiritually replenishing so as to nourish them as salt, as essential caregivers.
“what if we went slowly thoughtfully about the business of healing what if I bowed to you and you to me before we touched aching bodies what if we said out loud this is sacred work… what if I blessed your hands and you mine before we began… listening to broken bodies hungry souls would we then return to the place where so long ago we felt called where we knew for sure that we did indeed have hearts… hearts that were courageous enough to break again and again and again hearts that were not afraid to weep at the sheer beauty of (it all)… what if we were unafraid to weep at the joy of newborns crowning or the resurrection of hearts expired… or said a blessing and quietly contemplated the Mystery.” (Redesigning the Practice of Medicine – Pam Mitchell RN MFA)
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, we vow to be essential healers.
Question: How do I show support for essential healers?
February 5, 2023 Gospel Matthew 5:13-16 Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time