Suppose your spiritual life was a ball team. Who would be your starting five?

Remember this: All suffering comes to an end.
And whatever you suffer authentically,
God has suffered it first.
~ Meister Eckhart

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means
being able to say, What are you going through?
~ Simone Weil

It is easy to assume that Love is the center point or the hub of the wheel whose spokes represent the plethora of religious traditions and spiritual paths in the world. Others might be able to build a solid case for Gratefulness being the centermost unifying principle shared among practitioners of the various world religions. I tend to lean toward another human quality that not only is at the core of the lives of those who hold different theological convictions and take different spiritual paths, but also is central for persons who don’t self-identify with any religious tradition or with the ubiquitous insignia “spiritual but not religious” or who are confessionally atheist but earnestly committed to living a significant life. That human quality that firmly connects us all is COMPASSION.

Compassion is the fourth member of my starting five on the Dream Team for an authentic spiritual life. It is one particular and essential manifestation of love on earth.

I think the extent to which the intuition is true—that compassion is the most unifying principle—is due to the deeply personal and indisputably universal human experience of suffering. Like the box that comes with a note about the batteries inside, when the box of life is delivered to us as we are delivered into this world it is marked: Suffering Included. There is no getting around this. Much as we might try to bypass it, suffering is part of the terrain. It is a given in the land of the living. The question is not will there be agony and anguish, but rather when suffering makes its presence known will we show up to meet it? And if we do show up to meet it, how then do we respond? Will we let it have its way with us? Will we resist it? Will we listen to it, deny it, bless it, curse it, spit on it, participate in it?

When suffering makes its presence known in the struggle or anguish of another, the most noble, wholehearted, and efficacious response from us is compassion. Compassion does not take away the sufferer’s agony. It takes away the sufferer’s aloneness in the throes of pain.

Compassion is not the antidote for physical pain. It is the remedy for unwanted privacy, the medicine for emotional, physical, and spiritual isolation. It is not a cure. It is an act of care. Where there is compassion no person is relegated to live in exile. Henri Nouwen’s definition captures all this in these few words: “Compassion is being together where it hurts.”

What makes compassion unique is not joining another person. After all, there are an endless number of ways and reasons for people to be with one another. Compassion’s forte and force for good reside in its bearer’s willing spirit and choice to be with another person or persons who are hurting. Compassion is rarely flashy, spectacular, or heroic. It has a more self-effacing, blue-collar, roll up your sleeves kind of vibe. Those who are compassionate are not seeking attention. Most often compassion comes in the form of an unseen thought, feeling, word, gesture, or deed that closes the gap between ourselves and another who is experiencing some kind of immediate or prolonged dilemma, anxiety, hardship, struggle, or affliction.

Compassion, like pain and suffering, comes in all shapes and sizes, in all sorts of weather, in all seasons of life, and at all times of the day. It is not a gift some have and others don’t. It is a conscious commitment and intentional way of being in the world. We set our minds and orient our hearts to do our best to reject the temptation to ignore, avoid, or refuse to be with those who are experiencing some kind of difficulty, ache, woe, misfortune, or trial. As the priest and Levite in the Good Samaritan story realized upon seeing the wounded man in the ditch, compassion is often inconvenient. Courage is the refusal to look away. Compassion is choosing not to cross to the other side but instead venture down into the ditch. And like anything worth doing, the more we practice compassion the more it becomes a part of who we are. If we are faithful in the little moments, situations, and troubles, we will be prepared to respond in moments of greater or more urgent need. And it is good to remember to practice it on ourselves as well. Author and Buddhist practitioner Jack Kornfield reminds us “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”

No matter our race, gender, class, politics, nationality, or religion, suffering makes siblings of us all. Compassion ensures we will never be estranged from one another nor ill-fated to suffer alone. Compassion is the surest sign we belong to one another, the embodied expression of our awareness that we need each other to live and love and flourish.

♦    ♦    ♦

One spring afternoon when I was a senior in high school my mom asked my younger brother and me to come into the dining room and sit down. She had something to talk to us about. I was eighteen. My brother was just shy of fourteen. Our older brother and three sisters were no longer living at home otherwise they would have been part of this get-together that was to be a pivotal moment in all of our lives. I remember it was very brief. She told us she had gone to the doctor earlier in the day suspecting the pain she had been feeling the last three months or so was arthritis. But it wasn’t. And then she spoke the words I carry with me to this day: “He said I have holes in my head.”

When everyone in my family received the news that my mom was sick and dying, she asked us not to tell anyone. And I didn’t until I couldn’t not tell someone.

It was another spring afternoon, this time a year later when I was in college and on the baseball team. I was the shortstop and my buddy Jim the second baseman. We were shootin’ the bull as they say, shagging balls in the outfield during batting practice when suddenly the tone changed. Jim tells me that the young woman who pulled the rug out from under his heart our freshman year had told him the night before she couldn’t afford to come back to school the following year. And because she lived half-a-country away this was pretty much the end. Although anatomically impossible, he was beside himself. This was about as vulnerable and deep as any nineteen-year-old male double-play combo went in 1974 (perhaps in 2022 as well). I listened. That’s all. I cared. Then I was called in to take batting practice. As I started to jog toward the infield I stopped, turned around, and said, “I’ve gotta talk to you tonight. Are you free?” He said, “Yeah.”

Somehow, given that Jim’s blue news was a bit more self-revealing than say his difficulty hitting the curveball—oh, wait that was me—it opened up something in me. We met that Friday night, of all places, in the TV lounge in his dorm. And the entire time—which was a couple of hours—no one entered the room.

The moment earlier in the day when Jim finished giving me the low down about his girlfriend leaving town, I knew Jim was the one I would break my silence with. I needed so desperately to tell someone that my mom was dying. But when we got into the lounge, I couldn’t get the words out. Or rather, I couldn’t get the words I came to say out. And I only needed four. Instead, I used my words to juke and joke and dodge and twist and turn and ramble on about God knows what until exhausted I found myself like a Dime Store robber chased by the cops into a dark alley that was a dead end. The gig was up. I felt intensely self-conscious. Despite my yacking, I had sensed much earlier Jim realized I was struggling and looking back I see his graciousness in allowing the spaciousness of the silence. Avoiding eye contact, I dropped my head. The sudden audible contrast from yadda yadda yadda to nada was palpable and pronounced. The silence got louder and louder. Jim just waited. But the harder I tried to tell him what I had come to say, what had weighed me down for almost a year, the more the words refused to come. The silence started to become as awkward as I felt. Words fail me today to name the heaviness in the room as I struggled. I could feel the pooled tears rising up my esophagus. Still, no words. I picked my head up. And to my total surprise, when I looked at Jim I saw his face was double-lined with tears that ran down in rivulets from either eye to his chin and onto the couch. And almost instantaneously, as if the mere sight of his tears oiled my tongue, I said, “My mom is dying.”

♦    ♦    ♦

I think that hour in that dorm lounge and the seemingly endless, agonizing shared silence with my college friend, was a sacred incident in my life. It was as profound as it was simple, as short-lived as it is now enduring. In my personal history of compassion, it looms large. I can’t recall any time before this occasion when I had experienced compassion as up close and personal, tangible and total as was this encounter with Jim. Why did I feel so thoroughly seen, heard, known, cared for, and loved that I remember it to this day nearly fifty years on? Because I think, it was there I first experienced what it means and feels like to have someone be entirely with me where it hurt the most.

Has it ever dawned on you that heaven—even in its most generic, non-sectarian mythical understanding—is a place, experience, reality, or communion where compassion is absent, nowhere to be found? Doesn’t that immediately sound odd if not a bit shocking? Something as laudable as compassion not being in heaven? But compassion only shows up when and where suffering has first made itself at home. And there is no suffering in heaven. Heaven or the Promised Land or Canaan or nirvana or Shangri-la or Xanadu or Paradise Lost Now Found are characterized as “places” where there is no pain, no suffering, no heaving wails of anguish, no tears of agony. In Revelations 21:4, the author offers these sustaining words of comfort and hope to beleaguered first-century Christians facing persecution:

[The Holy One] will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more
death or mourning, wailing or pain, [for] the old order has passed away.

The particular expression of love that is compassion is only necessary and conceivable because of suffering. Sadly, embarrassingly, until we find ourselves in the realm not marked “Suffering Included” but instead “No Suffering Allowed,” trying to find suffering in our world will continue to be like trying to find a needle in a needle stack. Minimally, our aspiration is for our compassion not merely to be commensurate with the world’s suffering but to be large enough to encircle it with human solidarity, Divine pathos, and love.

In part two of this series, I mentioned the close relationship between wonder and compassion. Like the mystic and the prophet who participate in these two integral responses to life, wonder and compassion are two of the surest signs that we’re truly alive, fully awake, and passionately responsive. What wonder and compassion have in common is their unfortified openness to be moved.

Once we have allowed ourselves to be moved, the most important aspect of compassion is the move from feeling-for–the-hurting-other to compassionate action directed toward being with that hurting other. Don’t get me wrong. We want and need people who are intentionally aware, open to being moved, feel deeply, are sensitive to the pain of others, allow their hearts to be broken, and feel deep sympathy for those a world away or for someone we don’t even know or for our suffering planet. Without compassion being one of our most noble and transformative responses to anguished others—whether humans or other-than-human life forms—we will simply go out together in a blaze of infamy.

My point is compassion is more than just feeling bad for someone. It is not merely a higher form of sentimentality. Compassion is the follow through of Deep sympathy. We must take the word compassion—meaning to suffer with—and make it flesh. Most fully realized, compassion involves entering into a relationship of solidarity with another or others who are suffering in some way. Thomas Aquinas wrote When you love another you begin to exist in that other. The central identifying characteristics of compassionate action are the movement toward and, especially, the being with someone who is hurting. If we were to mime the meaning of compassion, perhaps the best gesture is the embrace—reaching out, then drawing close. From one end, compassion ensures we will never have nowhere to go. From the other end, it assures us we will never have no one to hold.

For those of us who are Christians, Jesus is the embodiment of the pathos of God, the enfleshment of Divine love, the compassionate face of God, and the Word of God. And the Word of life that God speaks to us in Jesus is compassion. Lest we forget or go looking for some empty freedom elsewhere, we are reminded of this each Advent when we participate in the birth of The Awaited One born among us who is called Emmanuel, God-is-with-us. Jesus is the withness of God. Some ilks of Christians assert Jesus came to suffer because of us. Others maintain he came to suffer for us. What’s much harder to contest is that Jesus came to suffer with us. There lies the paradox of the gospel: God is the One who comes to be with us where it hurts the most and in so doing gathers us into the circle of compassion where we are made one in love. We are made in the image of a God who Jesus images. Perhaps there is no time when we resemble the unseeable Holy One more than when we choose to be compassionate to someone who is hurting and needs our consoling presence.

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