Recently, someone relayed to me their story of growing up as a Christian Fundamentalist. She recalled how her minister, prominent in Fundamentalist’s circles, had a propensity for deciding and proclaiming whether or not other persons (including renowned authors) were Christians. What dawned on my companion years ago was that this famous minister was so angry, so absent not merely of grace but of kindness and joy.

When asked by a reporter what was the most important question of the day, Albert Einstein is reported to have responded, “Is the universe a friendly place?” It seems to me that a related question might be: Is God friendly? Of course, I don’t mean this in the saccharine-like sense where Jesus is my pal and the Divine is our cosmic chum. I mean this in the deepest understanding of friendship as that orientation toward the good of the other. Is the Source of life inclined toward the good of creation and of all the earth? For monotheists, is God caring, compassionate? Or is God uninvolved, indifferent, or apparently like the God of the minister mentioned above a joyless, angry, grace-challenged, judgmental grump?

This question signals more than an abstract, inconclusively-fated theological debate on the nature of God. For those who claim to be created in the image of God, it speaks to the heart of the spiritual life as enacted theology. If we image God, who and what are we imaging?

Whether grounded in wishful thinking, audacious hope, a conviction of faith rooted in personal experience, or the better angels of our nature, when we speak of the compassion of God I agree with Rabbi Heschel who maintains that to do so is not to anthropomorphize God but rather to theomorphize humans. When like Jesus, humans are compassionate, merciful, and kind toward one another, when we work for justice, when we notice and reach out to the poor and vulnerable, we know instinctively that we are seeing the best of our humanity. We know intuitively, these modes of being and actions reflect qualities of the One from whom we come. For Christians, the pathos, loving-kindness (hesed), and compassion of God are believed to be embodied, expressed, and extended to us in the person and work of Jesus. Jesus not only teaches us what it means to be human but reveals to us what God is like. And yet, many who call themselves Christians, still function as if God were a killjoy; a mean, sadistic judge doling out sentences and punishments, and as if they themselves were nothing more than “sinners in the hands of an angry God” (Jonathan Edwards). In so doing we project onto God the worst demons of our nature variously making God seem to be intolerant, petty, vengeful, and mean.

Life, like theology, is no pure science or exact art. Some days we get by on conviction, other days on hope, and still others on wishful thinking and coffee. And yet, each of us, knowingly or unknowingly embody a theology. Each of us, consciously or unconsciously decide on a a fundamental starting point and a trajectory of life. I believe basic human kindness is a good starting point and that compassion is a noble life trajectory, a truthful and worthy way of embodying a theology informed by the vision, life, and teaching of Jesus who reveals the heart of God. I believe the late Catholic theologian Monika Hellwig got it right, knew the nature of God, understood the core message of the gospel, and not the fundamentalist minister mentioned above or the venomous Westboro Baptist Church. Hellwig referred to Jesus as “the compassionate face of God.” This means simply and not so simply that to be the image, child, beloved, and partner of God, to align oneself with Jesus, involves intentionally and consciously practicing radical kindness, compassion, and love.

We often assume that compassion is born through suffering, that when someone suffers they become more aware of and concerned about the suffering of others. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes not. But suffering is not required before a person can be compassionate. Whatever the initiating circumstance, compassion always requires an act of imagination. Poet, farmer, environmentalist, and cultural critic Wendell Berry writes:

You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness, you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human.

What begins in an act of sympathetic imagination leads to an act of sympathetic solidarity which, whether we know the other or not, is a sign of a friendship of the highest order and a testament to our being human.♦

REFLECTION:

Go through a “normal” day giving attention to noticing others (those with whom you live, and work, people you see out and about or on the evening news). Practice the preliminary step of compassion by imagining what their life is like. See whether by imagining life from their perspective (even those you deem fortunate or privileged) if sympathy happens.