To be a man or woman of compassion is to be present to those in pain in such a way that they feel safe enough, if they choose, to reveal their wound to us. Then after reverently receiving their storied-pain, we reverently reach out to touch them, at times physically, if appropriate, but figuratively certainly, always. When the leper comes to Jesus and says, “If you choose, you can make me clean,” Mark the evangelist records Jesus as being moved with pity or compassion, describes him stretching out his hand, and then says of Jesus, “he touched him.” A half a beat behind, Jesus says, “I do choose. Be made clean!” (Mk. 1: 40-45) One wonders if the words even needed to be said. It’s quite possible that the leper — considered in that place and in that time as untouchable, diseased, contagious, punished by God — was already healed in the deliberate, counter-cultural stretch of the hand to touch, was enlivened in the generous reach of deep sympathy and mercy.

What form does the reach of deep sympathy take? How do we reverently stretch toward the other who has dared to show us their vulnerability and pain or who is too weak or exhausted not to? With an empathic nod of the head? With a kind look that starts in the eyes and goes to each corner of the mouth? With a wordless, knowing dash of a sigh? With a gentle leaning in or back as if to show I have heard and do now receive the gravitas of your words? With an engaged silence that like a netted hammock stretched between the two of you is enough to hold the weight of the wound? Yes to any and all of these kind, heartfelt gestures of solidarity and connection.

When my mom was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, she made her husband and six children promise not to tell anyone. It put each and all of us in a terrible bind — or at least it did me since I was not individuated enough to know when to shirk decorum and opt for clandestine civil disobedience. We know better today than to make such one-sided agreements. One day a college friend of mine chose to share something very personal with me and later, at the end of our conversation, I discovered it had opened something up in me so that I found myself asking, “You doing anything tonight? I want to tell you something.”

That evening, as if the college lounge gods had conspired to keep the typical rowdies and couch potatoes out of the dorm TV room for over an hour, I struggled to tell my friend that my mom was dying. Only the words were being quite stubborn and resolute in their resistance. So I circuitously rambled on about everything and nothing until finally I ran out of topics, ran out of distractions, ran out of gas and found myself in a cul de sac of silence that was so palpably thick it was able to hold for the time being the words I could not muster. I stared at the floor. To my friend’s credit, whether by accident or a rare bout of nineteen year-old wisdom, he didn’t jump in to fill the silence with his own corresponding chatter. He could see I was spinning my wheels, burning rubber, desperately going round and round in the cul de sac trying to get out until I simply rolled to a stop on empty. As a result, the silence in the room seeped into me and got real loud. The tears that had pooled in my gut for ten months got on the elevator and road up the shaft of my body until they got off at my throat and threatened to drown or flash flood out of me what I was struggling to say. I picked my head up to look at my friend, and to my shock saw tears running down his face. Rarely, since that day in the late winter of my youth, have I felt such sheer compassion from another human being. Tucked inside his silence and spilling down his cheeks, the deep, tender sympathy immediately opened me up another layer and I told him that my mom was dying.

When compassion is hazarded, the healing (not the cure unless we have a messiah complex) resides in the connection, does it not, or in the willingness and desire to connect as if to say, “I don’t and can’t know your pain exactly, but I know the neighborhood quite well. I am wounded, too.” Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid revolutionary imprisoned for twenty-seven years who later was freed and subsequently became the President of South Africa in the country’s first democratically held election said, “Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”

All people have the capacity to be a healing presence in this world. And, like Jesus, all genuine healers have the willingness to be with others where it hurts. Abraham Heschel wrote that a religious person is someone “who holds God and [humankind] in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.” Like forgiveness, compassion is a consciously chosen, seasoned expression of love. It comes neither easily nor without scars. Its training ground almost always involves being tenderized by the irregularly regular pounding that comes with living. A sure sign of the nobility of which humans are capable of exhibiting, compassion is one of the unifying principles of all genuine, healthy expressions of religion and spirituality. It is, Heschel maintained, the index of a person’s humanity. In these partisan times when disconnection and discord so often seem to rule the day, I’d say compassion is the index of a school, community, and country’s character as well.

The agent of compassion is typically someone schooled in deep self-reflection (as opposed to self-absorption), someone who knows the inner landscape of his or her life, not just the mountain peaks, refreshing streams, and fruit-bearing trees, but the deep canyons, scorching deserts, and devastating storms as well. It is in those canyons, deserts, and storms where we experience failure, disappointment, loss, grief, suffering, betrayal, loneliness, acedia, being lost, being wounded, insecurity, disorientation, humiliation, and catastrophe where we are forced off what we think is the yellow brick road and find our way instead to the footbridge of self-forgetfulness that leads us to the paths of compassion, deep sympathy, and mercy that connect us to a hurting world. Is it any wonder that Rabbi Heschel, whose mother, two of his sisters, many teachers, neighbors, and friends were killed in the Shoah by the Nazis and who barely escaped himself, insisted “the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion.”

Artwork: (Top) Fritz Eichenberg, “Jesus of the Bread Lines”

♣ Twelve people lined up to play the game “Telephone.” I whispered in the ear of the man to my right, “Tell people about The Sacred Braid,” who whispered it in the ear of the woman to his right who whispered it in the ear of the person to her right and so on until it came to the twelfth and last person who after receiving the message said, “Okay, if you say so,” and then called and made an appointment to have her hair braided. Oh, well.

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