Lenten Spiritual Practice Series
Week One: Compassion
Rev. Lee Ann Bryce
Community Christian Church
February 26, 2012
Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Matthew 9:35-36
Christians are called to live in this world with broken open hearts.
Parker Palmer, Standing in the Tragic Gap
Today we begin a Lenten worship series on spiritual practice. Our focus today is on the spiritual practice of compassion. Compassion is a feeling deep within ourselves that the Buddhists call a “quivering of the heart.” Compassion is also a way of acting, choosing to be affected by the suffering of others and moving on their behalf. It can be said that compassion is the central ethical virtue in Christianity.
In the video we just watched, Standing in the Tragic Gap, Parker Palmer says that Christians are called to live in this world with broken open hearts, feeling the suffering in the world, including our own. To practice compassion means the willingness to bear witness to pain, to move toward it with caring, to go into situations where people are hurting. To use Palmer’s language, Christians stand in the tragic gap between the difficult, horrible realities that are present in the world and our dream of the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, where justice and shalom prevail. As we stand in the “tragic gap”, the challenge, of course, is for your heart to be broken open by pain and therefore able to respond, rather than be paralyzed by a heart broken apart, unable to act with creativity or hope.
If you’ve tried to practice compassion on any serious or intentional level, you might realize that it’s not easy to do. When you move toward others with compassion, you are likely to bump into your own judgments about them which can close your heart so quickly. You become acutely aware that these “others” for whom you’re trying to have compassion don’t look like you do, don’t live like you do, don’t have the same values as you do or don’t act the way you think you would under similar circumstances.
Practicing compassion is also hard because life is sure to present us with some new experience or encounter with pain we feel unprepared for. Your partner betrays you, someone you admire disappoints you, some event of unimaginable cruelty happens in the world and compassion once again demands that you open your heart and receive it. If we are to practice compassion we may count on the reality that over and over again we will be asked to meet change, loss, and injustice, by finding the strength to open our hearts when we are most inclined to close them off.
In his book Who Speaks for God?: An Alternative To the Religious Right – A New Politics of Compassion, Community, and Civility Jim Wallis puts it like this:
Compassion has less to do with 'doing charity' than 'making connections.' The word compassion means literally 'to suffer with.' It means to put yourself in somebody else's shoes, try to understand their experience, or see the world through their eyes. That always changes our perspective. True compassion has less to do with sympathy than it does with empathy.
The call to compassion is not about somebody 'doing for' somebody else. Rather, its value is in the connection, the relationship, and the transaction in which everyone is changed. The Hebrew prophets say that we find our own good in seeking the common good. The prophet Isaiah says that when we feed the hungry, take in the homeless, and 'break the yoke' of oppression, then we find our own healing.
Compassion doesn’t always call for grand or heroic gestures. It asks you to find in your heart the simple but profound willingness to be present, with a commitment to end sorrow and contribute to the well-being and ease of all beings (when it is within your power to do so.) A word of kindness, a loving touch, a patient presence, a willingness to step beyond your fears and reactions are all gestures of compassion that can transform a moment of fear or pain into a moment of connection and comfort.
In our text from Matthew, Jesus finds himself in the midst of tremendous human suffering. He traveled, he taught, he healed. He saw crowds of people, lost and hungry, with overwhelming need, all of which he could not possibly alleviate. Even though many were healed, there would still be poverty and exploitation which meant that he could not assure the end of suffering. But Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds “he had compassion for them.” That’s a different thing than all the things he did for them. He chose to align himself with the path of understanding and compassion. He learned to listen to the cries of the world.
We mustn’t confuse compassion and pity. They are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge, to share in some way with the suffering of others, pity is a mindset designed to assure separateness. “Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.” (Ram Dass in How Can I Help?) Do you see the difference? If I have pity for someone, I am separated from them. If I have compassion for them, I am connected to them. Compassion is the keen awareness that all things are interdependent. I may wish to withdraw, to isolate myself, but it cannot be done. And the illusion of my own separation only adds to the suffering.
Have you been blessed to know someone who inspired you with the compassion you saw in him or her? I’ll give you a moment to think about it, then turn to your neighbor and share.
Since we’re focusing on spiritual practices during Lent, each week we’ll explore specific ways we can nurture that day’s spiritual practice. We’re going to close with a short time of silent meditation. As you settle into a comfortable position, begin to follow your breath, breathing in, breathing out. And as you breathe in, silently pray: Be compassionate. And as you breathe out: as God is compassionate. (Time for silent breathing meditation).
Compassion means trying to see the world through God’s eyes. Through these eyes we look at our families and feel compassion for them, and our hearts expand. And if we keep looking through those eyes of compassion, perhaps we can see the world, with all its people, with all its pain, trusting that somehow everything that is is held in holy hands - and our hearts expand. And perhaps most difficult of all, we see even ourselves through the eyes of compassion. And our hearts expand.
A Prayer of Compassion
By Henri Nouwen
Dear God,
As you draw me ever deeper into your heart,
I discover that my companions on the journey
are women and men
loved by you as fully and as intimately as I am.
In your compassionate heart,
there is a place for all of them.
No one is excluded.
Give me a share in your compassion, dear God
so that your unlimited love may become visible
in the way I love my brothers and sisters.
Amen.
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