After year of tragedy, have people closed up wallets and hearts?

Catholics who have donated money and time to victims of the devastating natural disasters that have struck the world in the last year may be feeling depressed, withdrawn or stressed, says Sister Anne Bryan Smollin, CSJ, director of the Albany diocesan Counseling for Laity office.

Such feelings, she continued, are "natural, especially when we're saturated with so many disasters."

From the South Asian tsunami last December to the latest in a series of hurricanes this week, from homeless residents of the Gulf Coast to speculation about a pendemic avian flu, from worry about terrorist attacks to scenes of the massive earthquake in Pakistan, many people may feel overwhelmed.

Fatigued

That feeling is sometimes called "compassion fatigue," the sense that one cannot do any more giving or sympathizing.

Sister Anne calls that feeling a side-effect of a 24-hour immersion in devastation that results from modern media. Catholics, along with everyone else, can struggle with finding the limits of their responsibilities towards the suffering.

"What really scares me is that we see so much of it that, after a while, we get desensitized," she told The Evangelist. "We pull inward. We stop thinking about what we can do. We forget to even pray -- and that scares me more than anything.

"We want to care. It just breaks your heart to see these things -- to see people suffer and to realize that we can only do so much. We're affected by this."

Sense of self

The feelings are partially engendered by viewers' "being reminded of their own helplessness," Sister Anne noted. "It gets us in touch with our own poverty," both materially and spiritually.

After 9/11, she counseled families to fight desensitization by turning off horrific images on TV and in still photos if they became too much, but she added that looking away was not license to stop looking at all or "disengaging ourselves" from being involved with the restoration process.

Ceasing to read the paper totally is just as destructive as allowing ourselves to be saturated by the stories and images, she said.

"We still have to be in touch with reality," she said. "We have to stay connected to one another. That's the way we keep ourselves healthy and keep others healthy. [Catholics] are called to give as much as we can on every level, whether that's financially or with prayer. Sometimes, we feel we have to close our eyes; maybe that's the time we whisper a prayer. Maybe that's the time when we ask ourselves, 'What can we do?'"

Talk about it

Depressed or withdrawn feelings can be internalized, Sister Anne explained; when "we don't talk about things, they get bigger."

So she advises those who may be feeling overwhelmed by events to talk about their fears and hopes with family and friends, as well as to "listen to ourselves and hear our own concerns."

Another good way to stop looking inward is to redirect those thoughts outward, she said, and "really think about our neighbors," whether they are nearby or in a foreign country.

"Everyone is connected," she said.

Giving limits

Many Catholics, Sister Anne said, are worried about their ability to continue giving or wonder where their responsibility to alleviate disaster lies in comparison to duties to their families.

Is there a point, Catholics ask, where they should stop giving?

"When we get to that point where we say, 'I can't do this,' it doesn't mean that we're bad Christians or that we don't care," she said. "It means that we have to prioritize. We have to clothe and feed and keep our families safe and secure. At the same time, we have to ask, 'How can we also help other people?'"

What's enough?

This year, Catholics in the Albany Diocese have sent more than $2 million dollars to assist victims of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and may wonder "if we've given beyond what we are supposed to give," she said.

Catholics, called to be stewards of the world around them, are neither allowed to abdicate responsibility for what happens in the world nor required to give beyond their means, said Sister Anne.

A family worried about this winter's rising heating bills and gasoline prices, she said, might look to other ways to help the poor. Some of these ways could be offering their time at a food drive for Katrina victims or sending the money they would have spent at a restaurant to relief efforts.

"We have to listen to each other differently -- parents to children, families to families -- and listen to ourselves and hear our own concerns. We can't change things [in a natural disaster], but we can figure out how to help.

"We always think of money as the only solution, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can pray. There are many simple, little ways that we can teach others to stay connected. We can think of making a little difference on some level."

(10/27/05) [[In-content Ad]]