The Difficult, Miraculous Gift of Compassion
Last week I spoke at length about surviving in today’s world without being swamped with compassion fatigue, about the two steps I believe will buoy us up even as our days and hours are filled with situations demanding our compassion, that will protect our hearts while allowing us to participate in the healing of the unending sorrow that surrounds us. Face the pain. Act to alleviate the pain. Act in small, perhaps unexpected ways that we might not even recognize as helpful. I mentioned some of the circumstances that call forth our compassion: victims and survivors of natural disasters, gun violence, unjust employment practices and unlawful detention, people we know intimately or casually, and people whose stories we learn through the news. So many people, so many urgent invitations to be compassionate.
I spoke about all that. I didn’t address a question that should be central to any discussion of compassion for us, as people of faith, as Unitarian Universalists, as a community that holds Love at its center: who deserves our compassion? Are there people or groups of people outside our capacity or our province for showing compassion?
Like perpetrators of gun violence, for example? Or public figures who spread hate speech, vitriol, dangerous misinformation? Who have ruined lives, destroyed family and communities, caused deaths through any number of direct and indirect means? Are we called to include them among those for whom we have compassion when they are hurting?
These are questions I admit I hadn’t spent much time considering until this fall. Then a couple things happened to challenge the stinginess of my own compassion.
When Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, many of my people took to social media and attempted to walk the narrow line between not celebrating or glorifying any violent death and still remaining true to and vocal about the damage they knew the man had, through his organization and his public appearances on college and university campuses, done to countless young people. I understood the impulse behind their posts, though I chose not to attempt the same difficult feat. And I certainly recognized that the hyperbolic response of Charlie Kirk’s supporters to such statements from not just my friends, colleagues and acquaintances but hundreds, thousands of others, meant not that those who had posted such things were cruel, evil, threats to personal or national security or any of the other things that were said of them. The hyperbolic response meant only that social media, a powerful tool, isn’t a venue where subtlety and fine lines are either recognized or particularly effective–especially in such fraught and perilous times.
One of my colleagues, Rev. Dr. Marlin Lavanhar Senior Minister at All Souls Church in Tulsa, used social media to respond quite differently. On Instagram he posted
"A Love Letter to My Conservative Friends and Neighbors:
Today is the funeral for Charlie Kirk.
I know this is a very emotional and painful day and time for many of you. Our whole nation has been impacted by his killing.
Whatever your connection to him — whether political, personal, or symbolic — grief is real.
And I can only imagine how hard it must be to watch the online mockery that so often follows the death of a public figure.
That kind of pain cuts deep.
I just want you to know: I see that, and I’m holding space for your sorrow. I’m sending love to you and yours today.
I’m praying for our country. I hope we can all pray for one another."
Dr. Lavanhar’s letter was masterclass in heartfelt, publicly expressed compassion. I don’t know what he may have said about Charlie Kirk’s words and actions prior to his death or since. But in a moment when people were hurting, he recognized the universality and particularity of grief. He felt the pain of his conservative friends and neighbors, and he took action to help–sending love and prayers to alleviate their pain. He neither betrayed a hint of defensiveness about expressing love and prayers, nor attempted to justify the love and prayers. He didn’t undo the expression of love and prayer by saying, “but, still, those who sow hate will reap what they sow.” He stopped with love and prayer. For his friends and neighbors, for our country, for all of us.
When someone killed two detainees and injured a third at an ICE facility in Dallas on September 24, a neighbor was interviewed by a reporter, as neighbors often are. Her remarks caught me off guard. She said, “I never imagined someone who felt so disenfranchised lived so close to me.”
That’s never what the neighbors say. We’ve heard countless neighbors of alleged mass shooters or perpetrators of other violence interviewed. The neighbors always say “he [because it almost always is a he] he was a quiet person who kept to himself.” Or “he was a little strange.” Or they just didn’t notice him that much. Maybe, sometimes, they say that he was helpful or friendly. The neighbors may be curious or bewildered but they almost never reveal empathy or insight. But that neighbor did. “I never imagined someone who felt so disenfranchised lived so close to me.”
Her comment actually revealed more about her than about the shooter. About her capacity to see pain in someone who had just inflicted terrible pain. Her capacity to feel the pain of disenfranchisement, and move beyond feeling empathy into compassion. Last week when I was going on and on about our need to act in the face of pain in order to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by it, Megan was upstairs putting it more simply to our children. She told them, “empathy plus help equals compassion.”
The neighbor of that shooter helped through the rare, profound, and very simple act of speaking words of empathy aloud, into a microphone to be broadcast across the nation. “I never imagined someone who felt so disenfranchised lived so close to me.” It’s hard to believe that statement could have helped the shooter; he was already dead by then. But I’m convinced it did help.
Maybe it helped his loved ones, who heard, among a flood of words, those few words that weren’t condemning or hateful. Maybe it helped someone else who feels disenfranchised, who heard that sometimes someone tries to see them, understand, even just a stranger on the radio perhaps way across the country from where they are. And maybe–I think, definitely–it helped in an infinitesimal yet not insignificant way, shift our society’s divisive rhetoric and unyielding, inflamed and divided loyalties toward understanding, reconciliation and repair.
Or maybe it only helped jolt me into a more thoughtful, deeper and broader consideration of compassion. That too is not insignificant. Preachers need to guard against complacency, and against our own divisive, unyielding, inflammatory rhetoric, and call ourselves back to impassioned and principled yet nuanced understandings and appraisals of the human condition and current affairs when we stray. So, I am grateful to that neighbor, and to my colleague in Tulsa, for the challenge their compassion issued to me and to all of us.
They called me back into my Universalism. Back to my core belief that no one is beyond the love of God, back to what we as Unitarian Universalists have long affirmed, that every person has inherent dignity and worth.
We can and must recognize, acknowledge and condemn horrific words and violent acts of hatred that have always stained human souls and fractured human communities and claimed human lives in all times and places, and seem today to be a gathering tide of destruction the magnitude of which we say hasn’t been since in 70 years but in fact has been since in other countries many times over, in those same 70 years. And I do, but if I cannot also act compassionately when those who speak such words and take such actions suffer personal or familial loss, where then is my faith?
Now, let me be clear. Feeling empathy for someone who has done atrocious things and is now in pain, suffering from loss or grief–Caspar Weinberger, perhaps or whoever you substituted for him when listening to this morning’s reading or someone closer at hand, in our own city or neighborhood or community–feeling empathy for someone who is in pain, suffering and acting to alleviate that pain does not mean we suddenly excuse all the things we have found objectionable in their past and current behavior; it only means that we have refused to put them beyond the pale, beyond the reach of God’s love or our compassion. And, by the way, the act we take to alleviate the pain need be neither grand nor direct. It could be, probably is, that the most profoundly helpful act we can take in such situations is to remind ourselves of the full humanity of the person who is suffering. That act of recall helps restore our own humanity, and I firmly believe it also helps heal the world and the person who is suffering.
I need to be very clear about a second point. The call to be compassionate toward all people because of our belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all people, because our Universalism says no one is beyond the salvation of the Holy’s Love, does not mean we owe people who have hurt us or abused us or mistreated us access to our lives, our time, or even necessarily our forgiveness, though that might help us heal our own pain. It does mean that if we learn those people are in pain we extend compassion towards them, that we act to alleviate their pain in some way. But that action does not have to be visiting them, picking up a phone, or sending them a card. It can be saying a prayer, lighting a candle, resisting the urge to say they were a terrible person to us and they deserve this terrible thing that has happened to them. Such gestures are healing in ways beyond our comprehension. We can maintain our boundaries and remain in integrity with our Universalism.
I’ve used the word God a few times this morning, and I know it lands uneasily on some of your hearts. We also sang the word in our last hymn “But the love of God is broader than the measure of our minds and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.” The version, the one I grew up singing from the old blue hymnal, had more God in it: “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.” The closing hymn we’ll sing in just a few minutes ends with this line “Then everyone, of every clime, that prays in deep distress, prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.”
We dwell within a paradox as Unitarian Universalists. Whether we believe in God or not, or find the word God helpful to label that mysterious force or higher power at loose in the universe, we do tend to believe or at least hope that there is a Love greater than our human capacity to love–a Love more expansive than our own. And we definitely believe that whoever or whatever God may or may not be, we’re the ones boots on the ground, here and now. We’re the face and voice and hands that must embody and enact the Love some of us attribute to God. Love is greater than our capacity and we’re all we’ve got. Compassion is a pathway toward resolving the paradox. And life abounds in situations that allow us to be compassionate.
Last week I spoke quite a bit about up close and personal acts of compassion–about parents and children, about my colleagues and myself. This morning I’ve spoken a lot of compassion across distances and in public circumstances. Opportunities to put our Universalism into practice through acts of compassion aren’t limited, however, either to challenging ourselves with the humanity of people who have unleashed great hatred and violence upon the world or responding to the pain and suffering of the people closest to us.
Long ago, when I was still in college, someone told me that they say a prayer every time they hear a siren because they know if they hear a siren someone is in trouble. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, and sometimes what I think is “but how do they know someone is in trouble? How do they know if it is an ambulance or a fire truck or a police car?” OK, probably some of you can tell the difference, but I can’t. So how do they know for sure that someone is in trouble? But I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter if there’s a fire or a medical emergency or a robbery or an act of violence that calls for police presence–or even if someone has called the police because they witnessed someone being black or brown or unhoused or speaking a language other than English–a siren does mean someone is in trouble: the sick or injured person, the victim, the black or brown or unhoused or non-English speaking person, the perpetrator, the maker of the phone call, and, as likely as not, the first responders, are all in trouble. Of one kind or another.
What a generous act of faith and compassion to say a prayer without knowing any more than that, without pausing to parse the circumstances or consider fault or assign worthiness. How that woman’s heart must grow each time she says that prayer, and how our rent and wounded world must be repaired just a tiny bit each time she says that prayer. May we all find such a practice to turn our compassion loose into a world that so needs it. Amen
