Recovering Compassion

Mosaic along Philadelphia's South Street

For the past four years, I have prayed daily for compassion within our nation’s leadership. So it’s high time I read the only Henri Nouwen book I don’t recall reading, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life, co-authored in 1982 with Donald P. McNeill and Douglas A. Morrison.

The copy I’m reading was my gift to my mother on Valentine’s Day, 1993, “remembering your own gracious gifts of compassion,” I wrote in it.

It’s an eye-opening experience, replete with many surprising considerations. Though I’ve written elsewhere that caring for those in need is considered by archaeologists a sign of civilization, compassion is not universally considered the highest human value. There are those who have argued that a compassionate society impinges on the “higher” value of individual freedom. Small wonder Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village was problematic for some!

The authors interviewed many people and many communities to prepare for writing Compassion. Of particular interest to me was their conversation about compassion in politics with the late U.S. Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a progressive of his time:

Senator Humphrey walked back to his desk, picked up a long pencil with a small eraser at its end, and said in his famous high-pitched voice: “Gentlemen, look at this pencil. Just as the eraser is only a very small part of this pencil and is used only when you make a mistake, so compassion is only called upon when things get out of hand. The main part of life is competition; only the eraser is compassion. It is sad to say, gentlemen, but in politics compassion is just part of the competition.”

The authors observe, “Compassion erases the mistakes of life… To be compassionate then means to be kind and gentle to those who get hurt by competition.”

Compassion is neither our central concern nor our primary stance in life. What we really desire is to make it in life, to get ahead, to be first, to be different. We want to forge our identities by carving out for ourselves niches in life where we can maintain a safe distance from others. We do not aspire to suffer with others.

Is this the basis of “white grievance”? Do some straight white males see themselves diminished by the ascendance of women, LGBTQ people, and people of color? For the life of me, I can’t work up compassion for those who oppose rights and opportunities for those who have been marginalized. But I can understand those who feel they have been left out of the system because I was for so long as a gay man. Yet perception is not always reality. Leaders who play up that perception to gain power are not honest brokers. They are mistreating the same people they claim to empower.

“Must we simply recognize that we are more competitive than compassionate and try to make the best of it…?” the Catholic Christian authors ask in their introduction. “This book says No…” and then quotes Jesus in Luke 6:36: “Be compassionate as your [God] is compassionate.”

The authors don’t use the terms, but the call of Jesus is counter-cultural and revolutionary: “it is a call that goes right against the grain; that turns us completely around and requires a total conversion of heart and mind. … God’s own compassion constitutes the basis and source of our compassion.”

Here [in the example of Jesus] we see what compassion means. It is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position… On the contrary, compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and building a home there.

In a time so filled with methods and techniques designed to change people, to influence their behavior, and to make them do new things and think new thoughts, we have lost the simple but difficult gift of being present to each other. We have lost this gift because we have been led to believe that presence must be useful.

But what really counts is that in moments of pain and suffering someone stays with us.

I have reordered some sentences within the spirit of the authors.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

The Wildest Places

I promised last week an excerpt from my talk this past Sunday for Atlanta’s First Existentialist Congregation, but the Spirit or a spirit has led me to do otherwise. I had completed writing my talk when I noticed I had overlooked a comma, which changed the meaning of my “scripture,” requiring changes to the talk itself.

Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

This is from Mary Oliver’s poem “Magellan” about his ambitious sail around the world. Initially I left out the comma between comfort and despair, which suggests “comfort” and “despair” are co-equal results of failing to “risk the wildest places.” Instead, I realized she intended despair as a result of comfort. She is warning that succumbing to mere comfort may lead to despair.

As I made the necessary changes in my talk to interpret my new understanding of the line, I laughed to myself that this would make a good lesson in a high school English class about the importance of proper punctuation!

But the morning after my talk the spiritual nature of my error came to me like a slap on the head from a Zen master. Now reading the mystical poet Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in my morning prayers, I read the Prophet’s response to a mason’s petition to “Speak to us of Houses”:

Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow...  In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together.

The Prophet ponders what seduces us in our houses, ending with:

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Then adds:

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

As I age, comfort and security become more attractive than ever. At an ingathering of LGBTQ prophets a couple of years ago, I inquired why a particularly courageous prophet was not there. “She and her partner are in a retirement home,” it was explained, “And she said they really liked it because they ‘didn’t have to go outside.’”

This past weekend a friend with mental health and addiction issues was released after eight months in jail. Though I’m familiar with so-called “institutional personalities,” those who repeat offenses to stay in the comfort and stability of incarceration, I had thought he would be overjoyed with his newfound freedom. But it has apparently deepened his anxiety. I witnessed something similar when he escaped a rigid, religious belief environment.

For me, the most memorable line (paraphrased here) from the old British film Thank You All Very Much featuring Sandy Dennis came when her character finally completed her doctoral dissertation: “So much freedom is so damn inhibiting!” Some of us in retirement experience the same sort of confusion, I guess one of the reasons I keep blogging.

In my talk Sunday, I drew a connection between Oliver’s “wildest places” and the “wilderness” as a frequent setting for spiritual enlightenment and pilgrimage in almost all religions.

Warning “your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing,” the Prophet addresses us as “children of space” and seems to anticipate Oliver’s sailing metaphor:

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. …

For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

“Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.”

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

The Scariest Book I've Read

I will be speaking on “Generosity in Three Movements” during the 11 a.m. worship of Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church this Sunday, Nov. 2, and leading a free workshop on The Cloud of Unknowing immediately following the service. (Pizza will be served, and remember that Daylight Savings Time ends at 2 a.m. that morning, so we “fall back” an hour.)

As All Hallows’ Eve approaches, I recommend a book that makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol feel likes romps through a garden.

I am presently reading, or trying to read, or avoiding reading Laurel Dykstra’s book, Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus.  It is the scariest book I’ve ever read.

“Rather than claiming that Christians are subject to a higher authority than others, I suggest that we in the radical discipleship movement admit that we are subject to lower authorities, the dubious and multiple authorities of the most oppressed speaking on their own behalf,” this member of Tacoma’s Catholic Worker Community and Episcopal Divinity School graduate writes in her introduction. In the margin beside this quote, I wrote, “Off to a good start!”

But halfway through the book, I feel like I’m reading The Grinch Who Stole Exodus.

I have always taken heart in the Exodus story, that of Israelites escaping the bondage and oppression of Egypt, as a model for the Civil Rights Movement, Liberation Theology, and for others seeking freedom, including my own LGBTQ community, in which both Dykstra and I identify. Rather than negate this, she suggests yet another way of reading the story.

More than once I heard biblical scholar Jim Sanders say, “When reading a biblical story, if you’ve identified with the good guys, you’re probably not ‘getting’ it. Read it again and identify with the bad guys,” he would say.

After all, we think WE would never crucify Jesus, but today it would be the U.S.A. and the privileged First World, the Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists, for example, who might find his so-called “gospel” intolerable.

In other readings I have had inklings that WE are Egypt: that we live well at the cost of others’ deprivation and suffering and exclusion. But in no book I have read has the message been so unrelenting and clear that developed nations and multinational corporations are the new Pharaohs with hardened heart.

I cringe when even liberal U.S. presidents declare our foreign policy should be based on OUR national interests, rather than the interests of the whole world. As this book implies, our neocolonialism smacks of the same paternalism as its predecessor.

This is not just about the very rich, the fraction of the one per cent who benefit the most from the way things are. Those of us in the middle class and those of us in the church are also complicit with this power structure that continues a new “middle passage” and “trail of tears” of the downwardly mobile because we too benefit from their impoverishment and enslavement and do little to prevent it. “For most of us trying to get along, finding a bargain does not seem like an act of violence,” Dykstra observes.

I’ve been reading Set Them Free in my morning prayers and have wondered if I should rather read it later in the day. This morning I felt so debilitated by what I read that I didn’t feel worthy of being in God’s presence. I felt downright shame. I tried to pray, but all I could do was ask forgiveness. My concerns that I might have otherwise eagerly lifted felt parochial and self-absorbed.

Blessedly for writing this reflection, Dykstra quotes Phyllis Trible saying “reflections themselves neither mandate nor manufacture change; yet by enabling insight, they may inspire repentance.”

And Dykstra quotes and paraphrases the Pan African Healing Foundation: 

They raise the question, “Are people of privilege capable of change?” There is an old African American proverb that says “it is easier to get the people out of Egypt than to get Egypt out of the people.” It refers to the responsibilities of freedom. But for people of privilege, for whom Egypt and empire have offered not only security and comfort but everything we have known, leaving Egypt and ridding ourselves of egyptian (sic) ways and habits will be slow and hard. Acknowledging our role in empire is a first step in the long, slow journey out of it. 

Related Posts:

One Nation Under God

Fear, Flight, Fight, and Fancy—A Revelation

Kidnapping Jesus

Does a Corporation Have a Soul?

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.