Compassion and things unsaid

Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world - Buddha

No greater love than this that a man lay his life down for his Friends - Jesus

I have always appreciated the “Buddha”. His sayings have stood as golden insights into the psychology of man. His teachings resonate, at times, with some of the highest expressions of natural law. My personal favorite quote is “Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.” Anyone that knows me will understand why I like that quote.

Light, enlightenment and the ground of compassion

For all I like about his teachings, we do differ. First, He is into the “round pot belly look”, I am not. Actually, I have determined to maintain that difference as long as humanly possible. Secondly, and most notable is our differing analyses of suffering. The Buddha teaches that suffering results from caring too much about things, or getting tied into things. If you only cool down and detach from life, you can spare yourself suffering. For the Buddha suffering is life, an irreducible condition and/or definition of life. The unavoidable consequence of such an idea is it leads to evil being only an illusion and the self rather vaporous.

My faith tradition analyzes suffering in a different way. For a Christian, Suffering is a result of real evil, a negation of the good in life, if you will. The teaching of the fall of creation (Gen 3, Rom 8) places suffering as a problem to be overcome. Thus, what is (suffering in this world) is not what ought to be. People, pain, and problems are real and from just such realism I can find a place for real compassion. Life takes on a double vision. The world is both brimming with hope and soaking in problems. From this bifocal vision of life, we see suffering in the world and we rush to it with a healing embrace.

By contrast, when detachment is the goal and indifference becomes a virtue, suffering can be subjectively distempered, yet at great cost. The cost is half our nature; the heights of joy, care and true engagement with the world. It is like spiritual euthanasia, killing the patient (the desires) to cure the disease (the experience of pain). For all its great wisdom (and I genuinely mean that) the Buddha’s ground for a compassionate life becomes weightless. As a philosopher, I can’t help but find their philosophy a bit inadequate. Neither true activism, nor social justice can grow from such a foundation. Compassion for the individual and their personal pain is at a disadvantage in the mysticism of Buddhist metaphysic.

For me, I have a conviction that grounds compassion in real life. It defines compassion as a desire that seeks out suffering. Simply put, it is nothing more than an extension of what a Christians sees in Christ. In the gospels, we see one who empathized and incarnated compassion in his very existence. We see one touching the leper while still unclean, honoring a woman whom society has discarded, eating dinner with the outcast, even teaching that all races, cultures and tribes are worthy of being called our neighbors.

Greater still, we see Him choosing to suffer and embracing the pain of the world for the sake of the world. This is why Christian’s believe in a suffering God. That in Christ God did not stand off from evil, indifferent and hostile, having nothing to do with it but ran to it, and identified with it, to redeem in an act of compassion. Thus the cross, in Christian theology, is a revelation of love, a deep love that does not take away pain but transforms it. As C.S. Lewis has written, “Christ came not to free us from our pain but to transform them into His.”[1] He does not solve the problem but changes it into a deep mystery and a mission, a way to find life in deep suffering and a path for all that wish to know life. T S Eliot in His masterpiece “Four Quarters,” speaks of God as a surgeon who has to produce pain in order to cure. So to is life found through pain,

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

It is this narrative of compassion that a Christian embodies in life. The life story of one that touched lepers and reveled illumined love. The light of life infused into ones life, brings a gravity that draws us to engage the needy and hurting though deep wells of an effortless yet cruciform love. As Schopenhauer once wrote, “Compassion is the basis of morality.”[2] Though his foundation was not in Christ until late in life, his thought still rings true. Great compassion can only be the ground that moves us towards great compassion.

Good BBQ, lessons learned and visions of great compassion

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. - John Lennon

I live detached, years of hurting for people and dealing with their problems slowly numbed me. I would rather tell them what to do than hold them in a healing embrace. So I retreated into books, into the thoughts of men like “Wittgenstein”, and the Buddhist like attitude of detachment. It is easier and you don’t smell like shit and pain when it’s all done. I was living as one indifferent, hypocritical to my own convictions. I was living and still find myself in a paradox of opposites. A place called “indifferent”, best explained by Elie Wiesel:

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.

The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.

And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.[3]

Yet, Life detached is not a life at all. I was reminded of this by a good friend. Someone like myself who’s heart is also guided by three governing passions, The longings for love, the search for knowledge, And unbearable pity for the suffering of humankind.

As we ate BBQ, and talked of days that have settled under the dust of time. Days that are never to return yet will always be remembered with fondness and nostalgia. Over cold slaw and diet coke, my nostalgia gave way to reality as I was ushered into a world of real pain and medical dilemmas. As a Doctor she sees pain in real time. The suffering of others is not a momentary bump but a road she must walk with them. Get her talking of it and her eyes ignite with the joy of a life enlightened by compassion. She cares so much for people that an 80 hour work weeks seems worth it. Such a person is an example to me. One who’s brilliance is only matched by her compassion. She shines when she speaks of being a doctor, it was this light of compassion that taught me in unspoken words, how to care deeply for the pain of others.

I saw the first blossom of it, many years removed from today. Before the dark battles that all big hearts must face, made there mark on her. The path to such compassion is always through that valley of stubborn darkness. I have walked that valley too and though I find myself on a different shore, we will remain linked by what I have learned from her.

The smell of BBQ in the air, the sound of joy in the conversation, I could not move from the captivating light. Where first I just saw a blossom, yet now, I hear stories of its fragrance, a fragrance filling the Hippocratic Oath with meaning and truth. She illuminated compassion for me. I was reminded of the words from the pen of Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain.

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain. [4]

As we finished our BBQ, I thought of all the good times we had together. She is on my short list of unforgettable people. How much we have both changed and the ironies in what parts have remained unchanged. Thank God, Her heart is unchangeable. Her heart, it’s her best quality. I may not let her cut on me until she has 10,000 surgeries under her belt (this brother ant stupid!) but I will let her be my teacher.

Blessings and thankfulness for the journey ahead my friend

Journey on……

Bertrand Russell once wrote:

Three passions have governed my life:

The longings for love, the search for knowledge,

And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.

In the union of love I have seen

In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision

Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.

I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].

I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,

But always pity brought me back to earth;

Cries of pain reverberated in my heart

Of children in famine, of victims tortured

And of old people left helpless.

I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,

And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.[5]

and Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us all:

A religious man is a person who holds God and man 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.[6]

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[1] C. S. Lewis, The problem of Pain

[2] David E Cartwright, “Historical dictionary of Schopenhauer’s philosophy”: Cartwright clamed that the quote comes from “On the basic of morality” a treatise by Arthur Schopenhauer.

[3] Elie Wiesel, US News and world report October 27, 1986. Wiesel, a French-Jewish novelist, political activist, Nobel peace prize winner, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the best known for “Night” a retelling of his time in the concentrations camps.

[4] Emily Dickinson “If I can stop one heart from breaking,”

[5] Bertrand Russell adapted from His autobiography, “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell.”

[6] Abraham Joshua Heschel, New York Journal-American, April 5, 1963. Heschel was a Jewish theologian and ethicist.