Many years ago, I came across a little book called “Pocket Prayers for Teachers.”  I suspect it was part of a series of “pocket prayers” for women—maybe there were pocket prayers for mothers, or nurses, or whatever. Somebody once told me it was part of a series called “apron pocket prayers,” so you know how old it was; it’s illegal now, I think, to say that women wear aprons.

Anyway, the book wasn’t mine. A fellow teacher was reading it and I asked to take a look at it. I opened to a prayer that has stayed with me all these years—different, not what you’d expect now, or even way back then. Very roughly paraphrased, it went something like this: Lord, help me not to interfere. The other children are ignoring that little girl on the playground again, ostracizing her, not letting her be a part of their group. I don’t know why, but I can see that it hurts her deeply. She yearns to belong, and they always reject her. Her little head is hanging down and she’s forced to go and sit alone on the bench. Help me, Lord, not to interfere. It’s so hard not to punish them for her sake, so hard not to try to change things, to just accept the way things are for her—as she is having to learn to do. Your will is mysterious. I can’t know what your purpose is, but I know that it will work for her good somehow, someday. Help me keep silent.

Now, this doesn’t jive with the way we think of our duty toward others—especially children. It doesn’t match the way we usually think of “social justice.”  It just isn’t right. Maybe it was the prayer’s incongruity with how we perceive our duty that made it stick with me all this time.

But it came to mind recently when I was having a conversation with a friend about Job’s “comforters,”  those friends of his who kept telling him that he must have done something to deserve the harsh treatment he was receiving from God. Job insisted on his innocence; he’d done nothing wrong. Like the comforters, we tend to see everything in cause-and-effect terms as the sciences (including the “inexact science” of psychology and the “social sciences”) have all taught us to do: You have cancer? You shouldn’t have smoked. You’ve had a stroke? You should have watched your cholesterol. Your husband is having an affair? What did you do to cause that? Etc.

The illusion behind this knee-jerk compulsion to explain misfortune is control. We so like to think we’re in charge of what happens to us that we make up causal scenarios to justify the bad things that happen to others. And besides, it’s easier to blame the victim, to criticize them, than it is to have compassion for them. Finding causes is cheap and it makes us feel superior.

That pocket-prayer came to mind. Did the rejected little girl lack what we’re fond of calling “social skills”? Did she have bad breath? Body odor? Now, you know that kids being kids, they’d have told her—very bluntly, in fact. I think you have to believe that, for the teacher to pray that prayer, there was no apparent cause for her rejection. Even brats and bullies have friends. Not yet inculcated, as we are, to have a reason, a cause, for everything, maybe they were being cruel because—they were being cruel. Maybe someone has a stroke or gets cancer regardless of how carefully they live—and maybe the woman’s husband was unfaithful simply because he was unfaithful, and it had nothing to do with her.

 You have to face it: there was no reason for her rejection. The teacher got that—we have trouble with it. We are Job’s comforters.

The memory of the prayer, and the discussion of Job, inspired me to tell the Samaritan’s life story. Why did the Samaritan stop and do so much to help the poor traveler, robbed and beaten and left lying in the ditch? Maybe … The Samaritan was a man who had business dealings regularly in Jerusalem. He had to travel a lot, and he had to travel alone. After the first time he was robbed and beaten, he went to night school and learned self-defense.  But then, he was robbed and beaten by gangs; one-on-one self-defense didn’t work. So he tried community organization, planning a kind of neighborhood watch for travelers. But people were too apathetic, not caring about what happened to travelers unless they themselves were the travelers, and nobody was ever robbed and beaten except him. After that, he aimed for legislation—tougher laws to insure travelers’ safety—but that failed too, since it wasn’t a problem for anyone but him. He shook his fist at Shaddai—why me, Lord? And then one day, he saw the man in the ditch, he saw everyone passing him by—and we know what he did.

That teacher would never know why that little girl suffered her classmates’ rejection of her. But she knew all she needed to know. What happened to that little girl? What did she grow up to be? A Mother Teresa, maybe? Or maybe she just grew up to be a teacher. Who know? Job? Maybe the Samaritan knows.