On Compassion
And the annihilation of self-love
I was raised in the Catholic Church and the teachings of Christ left an indelible mark on me. (Not stigmata, mind you.) An old friend who unlike me still has faith in the Church sent me this video by Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Sister. Her subject is compassion and I highly commend it for its thoughtfulness:
Compassion, she explains, means to suffer with another person. Few people wish to suffer, of course, but through suffering we sometimes grow stronger, gaining in wisdom.
The Book of Job has a passage: Man was born to trouble as sparks fly upward, which I first saw in a “Peanuts” comic strip. (Charles M. Schulz slipped a lot of Christianity into his strips.) Every person has troubles. All of us suffer. As the REM song goes, everybody hurts, sometimes. But if we have someone by our side who can suffer with us, who can truly show us compassion, we can support the burden more easily because it is a shared one. We are no longer alone in our troubles and our suffering. We can hold on, as REM sang.
As Sister Natalia notes, compassion untainted by self-love brings healing. She also notes that, for believers in Christ, suffering is alleviated because the Lord suffers with us. Christ is compassion. All this, of course, is a matter of faith, but faith can figuratively move mountains.
I truly respect religious teachers like Natalia, partly because they remind me of concepts you hear very rarely in American society today. Concepts like grace, mercy, charity, and peace. These are words and concepts that should be routinely on our lips. Instead, what we hear about incessantly is violence, greed, power, war, money, “success,” control, security, “illegals,” and so many other words and concepts that are distractions from, or even negations of, compassion.
Abraham Lincoln spoke of the better angels of our nature. Lessons like the one above from Mother Natalia appeal to those better angels. Let they who have ears, listen.
P.S. Good grief! I initially misquoted the Book of Job, so I’ve corrected it above (troubles versus suffering). Forgive me, God and Charles M. Schulz. This is what happens when I rely on my memory from reading “Peanuts” when I was twelve.
Here in the Chicago area we are being flooded with people begging; Venezuelans and Colombians with families and cardboard signs pleading for help. I asked friends about their views on giving to beggars and was not surprised to hear the standard line about seeing some example of begging fraud many years in the past and deciding on that single incident to sweep away all beggars as likely frauds.
How easily we rationalize doing what we want to do - in this case walking right by those at the bottom convinced in our own minds that our conscience is rightfully clear.
The golden rule always needs help as it is so easily put aside. Putting oneself in the other's place is a must if one is to even approach a moral way of living. The complete absence of this is evident in Gaza as the lives and property of a native people are taken without hesitation, so convinced are the destroyers of their righteousness. Atop it all is Joe Biden, with no hesitation enabling slaughter immediately after Oct 7 and unrelentingly staying with it for the following months. I send his campaign appeals back with WAR CRIMINAL written on them and a request to be dropped from the mailing list. Even if only one lowly mail handler sees the message, it serves a purpose.
I remember that years ago the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying that what today's world most needed more of was compassion; I don't remember anything else he said and I'm not a follower, but that stuck with me.
Then after reading Arthur Schopenhauer's vast magnum opus, the World as Will and Representation, over the past two years, I was struck by his insistence on the importance of compassion and loving-kindness.
Halfway through his work, I had jokingly summarized it to myself by saying "The shortcut to understanding all of Schopenhauer's philosophy is to be reborn a Hindu." Months later, when I came to the conclusion of his Gesamtwerk (complete works), I was struck by his quasi endorsement of ascetic Buddhism, which (in its purest form) is the closest thing to "true, original" Christianity (Jesus's message, not the institutional behemoth).
It's impossible to summarize Schopenhauer's doctrine succinctly, but he emphatically makes an appeal to have compassion and loving-kindness; that's the best that the best among us can do after being born into the cruel world.