Priscilla from Rochester wrote an insightful comment after Wednesday’s Catch about my trauma over seeing what everyone else sees all the time about me: the back of my bald head. Hers involves the way she used to see her family’s struggle with Alzheimer’s as different from other families in the same situation until she stopped to put herself in their shoes and realize how similar they were.
“My Mother had Alzheimer’s Disease,” she wrote. “When my brother and I first started to look into placing her in a nursing home, we would come away saying ‘Mom’s not like those people, she’s different, we can’t put her in there.’ When we finally had to place her in a home, I would see other families come in and look at my mother, and I knew they were thinking: ‘My mom is not like her.’ What I didn’t see in ‘those people’ was the wonderful, gifted, loving person they once were. I know that because those family members didn’t see my wonderful, gifted, loving mother either.”
When you come down to it, we are all more similar than we are different.
An article in the front page of Monday’s Los Angeles Times carried a similar message. “People are people,” remarked Stuart Perlman who paints homeless people on Venice Beach in southern California (where my son is a cop, by the way). “We’re all them, and they’re all us. We’re all one thin line from being traumatized and homeless.” (“Palette tinged with pathos” by Martha Groves, LA Times, June 11, 2012.)
Stuart pays $20 to have a homeless person sit for a portrait. In return, he gives them an 8×10 version of their painting and always brings some healthy food to share with them. In the process, he hears the stories behind the faces he paints, and incorporates what he hears into the images he paints.
Image the perspective we would have if we took the time to paint the faces of the people around us. Then we would be forced to hear their stories, and in doing so, we would find out what both Stuart and Priscilla found out: We are all more similar than we are different.
John Fischer The Catch 
At a local church they have a meal program which I have been part of for some time, we serve a meal every week to the homeless and anyone in need. The best part of the evening each week is sitting at the tables with them and hearing their stories while getting to know them. I am always amazed by how similiar we are and finding out just how blessed I am.
I always come away knowing it could easily be them serving me. Life is not always fair, and I am truly blessed to have been spared their current fate (at least up to this point).
Yes!
How true! When I worked at a Day Centre for Seniors, I started a -This is Your Life- book. Interviewing each senior, I heard many fascinating stories lor capable people and interesting lives behind the familiar faces. As I read them to the whole group, something warm and vital happened. There was understanding of who these people had been in more productive days. They became a cohesive group supporting each other in new ways.
Beautiful…
Michael Angelo lingered before a rough block of marble so long that his companion remonstrated. In reply, Angelo said. “There’s an angel in that block and I am going to liberate him.” Oh, what unbounding love would manifest itself in us towards the most unlovable – the most vile – if only we saw what they might become and in our enthusiasm for souls, we cried out, “There’s the image of Christ – marred, scarred, well-nigh obliterated – in that dear fellow and I’m going to make that man conscious of it.”
A. E. Richardson
That’s the message you’ve been bringing to us. Thanks John!
I love this quote. Thanks for sharing it!
Funny how each of us sees something different in folks we meet… a friend of mine and I used to take our sketch books to the local Waffle House late at night and ask the folks we met if we could sketch them – they always readily agreed! Sometimes, Cathy and I would sketch the same person, and often the person would ask if they could have my sketch. I always complied. One night, Cathy commented to me that people wanted MY sketches because they weren’t true to life (I tended to leave off a wrinkle here or there, or in some other way soften what I saw; she, on the other hand, drew what was THERE, warts and all, and felt her pictures told a truer story. She was right. The fact that folks preferred my drawings only proves that we really DON’T want to see all the truth about ourselves (either physically or in our character). On the other hand, do we really NEED to point out every little flaw we see in someone else? I like to think that those folks left feeling uplifted a litte by the attention (and in many cases the coffee or meal we provided) , and had a picture of the person they could be… so maybe the lesson here is see ourselves as we are and see others with gentler eyes. And John, I bet your “football field-sized bald spot” is really no more than a skating rink for a teeny fly!
Try the World Champion Kings. They could all skate on my head!
Very true, John. Over 20 years ago the “sameness” of people came home to me, on a regional basis. I’m from Texas, and I began to notice that although people from New York very often sounded angry, when I had the opportunity to sit across the table from them, I found out that they weren’t. From close up, I could see the twinkles in their eyes. I learned that people are people, wherever you go. “There, but for the grace of God, go I,” to be sure, but equally true is the converse: “Here, but for the grace of God, goes he.”