Compassion and "Good Trouble"

I’ve continued and now completed reading Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life by Donald McNeill, Douglas Morrison, and Henri Nouwen. Like my post about the medieval Christian classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, I find myself wanting to simply list some of the outstanding insights of these three Catholic authors who collaborated on this 1982 book.

One insight that startled me in my “well-deserved” retirement is this: “Are we really servants when we can become masters again once we think we have done our part or made our contribution?”

There’s a part of me that wants to conclude “I’ve done my part.” Nearly 40 pages later I am brought up short by this truth: “As the years go by, familiar images and ideas are often pushed out of place. Ways of thinking, which for many years helped us to understand our world, come under criticism and are called old-fashioned and conservative.”

Between these two observations the authors discuss the role of “voluntary displacement” in living a compassionate life, as Jesus did: “He did not think equality with God as a thing to be held onto, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness…” (See Philippians 2:6-7).

Now, we can theologically dither over this early understanding of Jesus’ nature, but let’s take it as a metaphor of God letting go of everything God-like to enter our world and become God-with-us. In an earlier post I explained the authors’ belief that compassion first requires community—sensed, actual, and/or geographical. In this early Christian confession of faith, the apostle Paul is illustrating how Christians are to be in community, “in humility regard[ing] others as better than yourselves.” (Phil 2:3)

I thought of entitling this post, “Compassion and ‘Voluntary Displacement,’” but doubted that would attract readers. Our late Congressman John Lewis’s understanding of “good trouble,” that is, protesting injustice, has a far richer ring to it.

From Compassion:

We cannot suffer with the poor when we are unwilling to confront those persons and systems that cause  poverty. We cannot set the captives free when we do not want to confront those who carry the keys. We cannot profess our solidarity with those who are oppressed when we are unwilling to confront the oppressor. Compassion without confrontation fades quickly into fruitless sentimental commiseration (p124).

Saying “no” to evil and destruction in the awareness that they dwell in our own heart is a humble “no.” When we say “no” with humility, this “no” is also a call for our own conversion (p125).

From first grade to ninth grade, I attended a Christian school where my mother taught first grade for thirty years. Each classroom was assigned a missionary for correspondence and contributions, a kind of “voluntary displacement” that took us out of our privileged and largely white American world. When the missionaries came back to the United States on furloughs, they would regale us with tales of their travels and work. As much as I enjoyed those stories, I prayed to God that I would not be called to the foreign mission field—I didn’t want to eat beetles or have a dirt floor. That was a voluntary displacement I did not want!

But I was given a different kind of mission field—an involuntary displacement, so to speak: being gay! I guess you could say my “voluntary displacement” was being open about it and becoming an activist and author.

Right now you and I have been given another involuntary displacement, coping with a worldwide pandemic. And those of us who are white have heard a call to voluntary displacement as we recognize our white privilege (yes, again!) and welcome Black Lives Matter.

Around the world, those who colonized or enslaved, infected or exploited other peoples face involuntary displacement as we come to appreciate their lives, their customs, their suffering, our sins and our privilege. We may form the communities the authors of Compassion affirm are the prerequisite for compassion, Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community.”

Loving our neighbors as ourselves requires first recognizing them as neighbors, members of our communities, residents of our countries, and fellow citizens of God’s Commonwealth.

A beloved LGBTQI activist giant died last week. Co-authored with Letha Scanzoni, Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s signature book, one of the earliest of our movement, raised the question, “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?” Thanks be to God that so many people throughout the world are finally answering “yes”!

The question “who is my neighbor?” asked of Jesus came from someone possibly hoping to limit the possibilities, and so Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, a member of a hated “foreign” “mixed” race of a different faith who proved redemptive for a victim of violence.

 Jesus thereby teaches the universality of our neighborhood.

Related posts:

Recovering Compassion

Compassion and Community

Thanks to a reader who informed me the above image is of the sign board outside the United Methodist Church’s general board of church and society building in Washington DC, across the street from the U.S. Supreme Court building. As I recall, other denominations also have offices in that building.

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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.  

Jesus, the Biggest Loser

Today I have allowed a mysterious stranger (not unlike the one Mark Twain wrote about) to pen this post, one who wants to remain uncharacteristically anonymous. For balance, however, I have followed this screed with creed.

Anyone who gets crucified is a loser. Someone who can’t save himself cannot possibly save the world. He certainly shouldn’t have his name on so many buildings.

Jesus, you hung around with losers. You could’ve had the best seat in the house and hung out with winners, but you preferred people I wouldn’t even spit at.

And your speeches are all for losers. The meek inherit the earth? Ha! Love your enemies? Gimme a break! Go the extra mile? On whose dime? If someone sues you for your cloak, give your coat as well? That’s only if you can’t afford a good lawyer or a creative accountant.

Blessed are the poor? What were you smokin’? Theirs is the kingdom of heaven? Sounds like welfare and entitlements to me! Woe to you who are rich? That’s the line of those income inequality guys.

Anyone who gains the whole world is a winner in my book, not a loser!

Your best speechwriter was John, who made grand claims on your behalf, but John lived almost a century too late. Boy, I’d love to get my hands on those lost gospels—maybe they’d show you up for what you were.

Jesus, ya shoulda listened to me in the wilderness! Tell people stones are bread! Keep doing and saying spectacular things to get noticed! Worship anything that gives you power!

Now, a lot of your followers have taken my advice, and are doing quite well, much better than you. That’s the power of positive thinking, speaking in superlatives, and telling people what they want to hear. In truth, many of your followers are embarrassed by you and by your weak, socialist ways. They want a winner, that’s why they declare you king, when you and I both know you’re only the king of losers.

Telling people they need to change their ways is a downer. Challenging them on those they exclude or mistreat or judge is not the way to win friends and influence people. And telling ‘em to be compassionate, like God—haven’t you read the Bible? Wrathful and jealous, ready with the fire and brimstone and Tweets, giving ‘em hell!  I incarnate that God better than you!

Now I gotta admit the Resurrection was a good deception. Makes people believe that you were really successful, that what you taught was right, even eternal. But we both know the truth, don’t we? Your life and your words no longer live and have not changed the world for the better. Where is this kingdom of heaven you promised? Looks like I’m not the only one pretending to be a messiah.

Give it up, Jesus! You’re fired!

So this contributor doesn’t have the last word, I’d like to provide an excerpt from Paul Ramsey’s Basic Christian Ethics (1950), a text I read in college, followed by a scripture from Philippians: 

Ordinarily it is supposed that the way to obtain a more and more perfect conception of the divine nature is to add on as much power as possible, as much impeccable self-sufficiency, as much imperturbable sovereignty, as much unqualified majesty. …

However, from a Christian point of view it is possible to think of God too highly, for Christ reverses all we expect Highness to be; the God who put him forward is one whose “grace” is only his mercy and forgiveness. Of him we cannot think too lowly. …

Such radical reversal of ordinary conceptions of the divine nature follows from the basic conviction that Christ is clue to knowledge of God. Christianity does not say, “Behold the Christ, half-God, half-man, Behold glorious strength thinly disguised, Behold Superman in a business suit, Behold the majestic God you know already in a peasant’s tunic.”

Instead the New Testament proclaims, “Behold weakness, Behold divinity divine enough to abandon divinity, Behold majesty secure enough to proceed un-majestically, Behold strength strong enough to become weakness, goodness good enough to be unmindful of its own reputation, Behold love plenteous enough to give and take not again.” 

Philippians 2:4-8: 

Let each of you look not to your own interests,

But to the interests of others.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

Who, though he was in the form of God,

did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the point of death—

even death on a cross.

Related post: The Leader I’d Like to Have

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.