Compassion is the basis of morality. –Arthur Schopenhauer
Good day, Gentle Reader. In early June, 1997 I had an experience that left me embracing these words: ‘Love is all that really matters!’ Love is the tap root that feeds, nurtures and sustains Compassion. Today I am going to write a bit about the virtue called Compassion. This is an ‘every-person’s virtue.’ I, however, will be writing rooted in a Christian perspective – the perspective that powerfully influenced me from day one of my life. I invite you, Gentle Reader to consider this virtue that is rooted in your life – whether it be rooted in a faith tradition, or a spiritual tradition, or a humanistic/philosophic tradition.
In his book titled, Compassion, the great spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, offers us this perspective: Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Each day, the days I am awake and aware, I continue to realize that my commitment to live compassionately requires, among other things, constant learning and conscious personal renewal. I call this learning and renewal via my P.I.E.S.S. (the five dimensions that contribute – or hinder – my being human: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, Spiritual & Social – think: relationships).
Christina Feldman, in her book Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World, writes: We are always beginners in the art of compassion. No matter how advanced or refined we believe our understanding to be, life is sure to present us with some new experience or encounter with pain we feel unprepared for. . . . Over and over you are asked to find the strength to open when you are more inclined to shut down.
Compassion is a challenging virtue. Living rooted in compassion is mostly inconvenient and often discouraging (think: dis-heart-ening). Living rooted in compassion requires me to willingly pay a price – the price of being aware of and of empathically sharing the other’s suffering while embracing the realization that there is little, if anything I can do to diminish his/her suffering (we are, after all, a ‘do-centered’ Culture; sadly our ‘do’ too often results in ‘do-do’…but I digress).
My call to live a life of compassion came to me in my late teens. I was visiting a museum and was stopped by a replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta. I remember stopping and starring and feeling deep pain. As I gazed at the depiction of Mary holding the body of her executed son my heart cried out in pain. Here was a mother whose grief weighed upon her like a huge boulder, a boulder that was crushing her heart.
Compassion thrived in the heart of Jesus. Jesus was compassion in the flesh. Compassion, for me, is the virtue that exemplifies his life. As a follower of Jesus I, like those who actually followed Jesus during his life on earth, am called to Be Compassionate.
In calling us, Jesus knows what he is asking of us. [to be continued next time]
Love one another as I have loved you. –Jesus
Searcher-Seeker 