Caring, Love, and Reparation: Their Origins and Meaning

The renowned American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr has noted that “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.  No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.  Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

Why and how we love, express concern, and seek to remedy our relationships when they suffer, have been central themes in the psychoanalytic endeavor from its inception.  While the full flowering of those components have come relatively late to human nature, their origins may be inferred from the archaeological record of our earliest ancestors. 

Psychotherapist and analyst Pilar Jennings will examine the triad of caring, love, and reparation in the individual’s psychological development from infancy, while paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall will trace the nature of caring and empathy to our early ancestors.  Historian of science Richard Milner will examine the evidence of humankind’s earliest art, seeking clues to what it reveals (or hides) about exactly what kind of creatures we are.

The late anthropologist Miriam Lee Kaprow showed that some of us, such as astronauts, miners, and firefighters, epitomize the notions of love and caring because they lay down their lives for their fellow man without reservation.  As St. John said, “Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friend.”

Of all those identified by their selflessness, Professor Kaprow showed that firefighters are unique, because they lay their lives on the line everyday for all of us, regardless of who we are.  Furthermore, in their concern for burn victims they complete the firefighter’s unique commitment to that triad of caring, love, and reparation.   

Vincent Dunn, retired Chief of the New York City Fire Department, professor of fire safety, author, and lecturer, a long-time friend and associate of Dr. Kaprow, will show that the firefighter’s commitment to duty and sacrifice rests upon the ideological foundations of love and morality.  And firefighter William Leahy, President of the New York Firefighter’s Burn Center Foundation, will explain the firefighter’s special empathy for burn victims through the role of the fire service in the physical, emotional, and spiritual reparation in the lives of burn victims and their families and loved ones. 

How caring can express our own deepest humanity has interested bio-ethicist Bruce Jennings for many years.  That interest has drawn him to analyze our most intimate hope in the potential of those suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.  As a disorder of the mind as well as of the brain, he will explain, dementia care must be enabling as well as protective.  It should focus on preserving and sustaining the individual as a maker of meaning and the subject of moral regard—“re-membered” in the human moral community.

Back in the 1970s, that community acknowledged the caring of a great lady in the field of business, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, one of the first working women engineers to hold a Ph.D.  Known as the Mother of Modern Management and First Lady of Engineering, she pioneered with her husband Frank Gilbreth in exploring human needs through time and motion studies.  She found her greatest fulfillment in the rehabilitation of the handicapped and solving problems of age and aging.  She often said, “We need educated hearts.  We need people who care.”  Nancy Reynolds, who wrote Lillian Gilbreth’s eulogy for Industrial Engineering magazine in 1972, will share highlights of that great lady’s achievements of the spirit.

Finally, we consider Reinhold Niebuhr’s insistence that we must be saved by that form of love he calls forgiveness.

Professor of the Talmud and Rabbinics David Kraemer will address the notion that all relationships, whether between one human and another or between humans and God, sometimes go bad.  Partners transgress, failing to keep even the most fundamental promises.  In the wake of such transgressions, he asks, is rupture the only possibility, or can transgression be forgotten and a re-conditioned relationship emerge?  Jewish tradition offers a path through the observance of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur by which all loving relationships can be repaired.  Individuals seek repentance (teshuva) and God, out of His care and love, forgives them (atonement, forgiveness).

The notion of atonement, reconciliation between God and man, is also found in the Christian tradition, dramatically exemplified last fall at the Church of the Holy Innocents in New York City, which will be discussed by art historian Donald Reynolds.  Following Dr. Reynolds’s proposal to Pope Benedict XVI to declare a year of atonement worldwide in reparation for the egregious betrayals on the part of many priests, religious, and ministers of the Roman Catholic Church, the pastor of Holy Innocents, Rev. Thomas Kallumady, with the blessing of his Archbishop Timothy Dolan, held a novena of Masses “in atonement for the ‘sins born within the Church.’”  During the nine weeks of Masses, his parishioners made an estimated 314,196 personal acts of reparation for that intention, a list of which the pastor submitted to the Pontiff as a Spiritual Bouquet.  Noting the overwhelming response of his parishioners, Father Kallumady encouraged the Pope to implement the program of atonement worldwide, and he asked Archbishop Dolan to extend the program to every parish in his Archdiocese.