Where Does it Hurt?
What if we try to reach them with words
What if we looked in their eyes
And asked “where does it hurt”
Would they find all they were worth
Monday was hoping
But Tuesday’s broken
-“Tuesday’s Broken” by Sugarland
At my retail day job we get a large range of people in the store. Located in the middle of Hollywood we have a number of unhoused people who come in as well, some with clear mental health issues. There are varying levels of familiarity, with regulars all the employees recognize, and some who come in once and are never seen again. There is also a spectrum of severity, between the guy who comes in, types on the sample keyboard in electronics for a bit, then buys whatever food he got, muttering to himself all the while, to the woman who screams obscenities in a croaking voice which makes my vocal cords hurt as she walks out with an armful of unpaid items.
There were two incidents recently that really struck me. The first was a man I had seen living in one of the nearby encampments, clearly in the midst of an episode. He walked down an aisle and swept a bunch of products off of the shelves, then continued down the aisle to the exit. A colleague who saw this too turned to me and said “doesn’t it make you want to punch him out?” What I thought, and should have said, was “no, it makes me want to get him help,” but the incident and the slight smile on my colleague’s face as he said that had admittedly stunned me.
The next day I was in the produce area when I heard someone screaming. As the sound came closer I picked out what the man was saying; something about blood money and Jesus. I turned a corner to see the man, clearly having an episode of some sort, surrounded by the four assets protection people, who were all trying to intimidate him into leaving the store. The thing was, I recognized the guy. He had been in the store for about an hour. I’d seen him earlier, wandering around perfectly content. Clearly there had been some incident, big or small, real or imagined, that had set him off. As I watched the four security guys doing their best to stare him down, I had the thought “what if they just talked to him? What if they asked him about the blood money and what Jesus thought?” not as a way to indulge his delusion, but to calm him down and try to connect. To engage him in that different way could have made a huge difference.
As I went back to the packing area with the order I was working the lyrics that sit at the top of this post drifted up from my memory. In the backroom, as I began scanning items in my order, I played a Youtube clip of the country music duo Sugarland talking about the process of writing the song “Tuesday’s Broken” from their 2018 album “Bigger.” “I had recently read an article by the Civil Rights activist Ruby Sales… in it she was addressing all the pain that we have in our culture, and that in looking at each other, if we just asked each other the question ‘where does it hurt’… and the Civil Rights community, the Black community, they have a wonderful language for this, but other cultures don’t have the same kind of language,” lead singer Jennifer Nettles explains when talking about the writing of the song. “If we were to just ask each other these questions, what could we avoid, if we had this human compassion?”
Rewatching that video made me recall listening to an interview with Ruby Sales herself. In 2020 On Being, a podcast hosted by Krista Tippett, released an episode with Sales.
…a defining moment for me happened when I was getting my locks washed, and my locker’s daughter came in one morning, and she had been hustling all night. And she had sores on her body. And she was just in a state — drugs. So something said to me, ask her: “Where does it hurt?” And I said, “Shelley, where does it hurt? ”And just that simple question unleashed territory in her that she had never shared with her mother. And she talked about having been incested. She talked about all of the things that had happened to her as a child. And she literally shared the source of her pain. And I realized, in that moment, listening to her and talking with her, that I needed a larger way to do this work, rather than a Marxist, materialist analysis of the human condition.
The simplicity of the question and the power of the simplicity of it, truly awes me. Even when I apply it to myself in moments of difficulty, I find it to be amazingly helpful. As Krista Tippett sets up at the beginning of the podcast episode, “it’s a question we scarcely know how to ask in public life now.” We don’t know how to ask it because it makes us uncomfortable. Whether it’s that we don’t know how to sit in another’s pain or because we don’t know how to deal with our own, it isn’t comfortable.
We can see some of the cause of this if we return to the ideas of the different layers I talked about in my post on Spheres of Influence. When we combine the Layers with the idea of Primary Reality within/Secondary Reality without by Eckhart Tolle, we can begin to see some of the interactions between our different Layers. Our Primary Reality is what happens in our own individual Core, filtered through the Identity layer. It’s the way we interact with the world around us, our perspective on our place in the world. The Secondary is everything from our Inner Circle out, all the things and people that we can’t control. As we move through life we are constantly exchanging energy between these layers. Our Primary Reality also becomes how we react to the energy and events that come to our Core from the Outer Layers, and Secondary also includes the ways people in those Outer Layers react to the energy that we put out. When this energy exchange produces conflict or distress it can often result in pain. To ask “where does it hurt” is to ask what Layer is the energy causing the pain coming from, and what direction is it flowing?
Sales speaks a lot about theology in that interview. “The role of public theologies for the 21st century, is a redefinition of community and our relationship to each other.” When I outlined the Community Layer I talked about how the internet has fragmented the way we view community in our society, with online groups and forums replacing what used to be something based on proximity. The more I examine things I can’t help but wonder if the continued push for social media and various types of online discourse aren’t a tool of oppression. Sales continues, “One of the greatest trigger fingers of the empire is to destroy intimacy, to destroy how we know each other.” In this Sales is speaking specifically about the Black community, but it is no less true for the wider world. As we separate more and more from each other physically, intimacy becomes more difficult, and as intimacy becomes more difficult, it becomes harder to even consider the question “where does it hurt,” let alone ask someone else. It leaves us with smaller Inner and Outer Circles, and fewer rings in our Community Layers. With that as the backdrop it makes me appreciate the social aspect of churches, because they offer a weekly gathering place to see other people, and often a built in community. I have seen conflicting stories that suggest Gen Z may be leading a rise in church attendance, which makes sense to me as a response to so much of our world going online. It also makes sense in the context of rising pain in the world, because religion offers ways to deal with the hurt we may be feeling. It may not say it that way, and there are many churches who do not fulfill that promise, and in fact contradict it, but the promise of it is there. The craving for some sense of relief for the collective, societal pain so many of us are feeling is strong.
Unfortunately with the way our society is setup all of that seems to benefit the people who hold most of the power; the wealthy and well connected few who depend on the distraction of the majority. It has led us to a place where hurt and pain abound, and instead of asking where the hurt is or comes from we are constantly pointing fingers at who to blame for it. And that finger pointing is often encouraged or orchestrated by those in power.
I have been thinking of this a lot these last few years. There has been a necessary focus on the rights of minorities in the past decade. Movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter are making society confront real systemic problems. I do worry, that with the rapid societal paradigms shifts that we risk ignoring those whose power is shifting at our own peril. I think the old divisions along racial and gender lines are not necessarily as salient as they used to be. I think class is becoming the most significant divide in our society right now. A lot of pain has been concentrated in people of all ethnic/racial backgrounds who do not have a lot of money. If we purely divide those with the lowest incomes among lines of race or gender we risk adding fuel to the fire by giving those in power kindling that is ready to burst into flames.
We are in a place now, particularly in America, where many people are hurting and have been tricked somehow into voting for people who will only exacerbate that pain. When you look at the actions taken by the 119th Congress (and the lack of actions that have allowed the executive branch so much power), it is to see a lot of pain that will come for the goal of helping the wealthy. I’m not saying that we should be asking where the hurt is of House Speaker Mike Johnson and his ilk, but if we don’t consider those people who have become disadvantaged and yet believe in him and his policies, if we refuse to ask where their hurt is, I worry that we are in for a lot of trouble as a society.
If we are to shift the paradigm we need to first examine the old one and where it has brought us. In order to know where to go one must know where one is starting. So we must ask ourselves when it comes to these old and systemic divides among race and gender, where is the hurt?