“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein

My son gave me the autobiography of the actor, writer and film director Alan Alda, for Christmas. If you are old enough you will remember Alan Alda as the central character, Hawkeye, in the long-running television serial, “M.A.S.H.” He is a very able actor and his autobiography is honest, funny and rather unusual as such things go.

Alda describes how, over time, he learnt to be an actor and how he learnt the difference between acting and performing. There was a moment when he named for himself what was necessary to bring a scene to life. The word he used was ‘compassion.’

Alda realised that in a scene he had to be aware, all in the same moment, of himself in character and his feelings and of the other actor / actors and their feelings. He had to be aware of their reality as well as his own. Up to this point he had only been trying to get right his character in the scene.

Compassion comes from the Latin. ‘Com’ means ‘with’ and the nearest meaning of ‘passion’ in this case is ‘patient.’ Thus compassion strictly interpreted means being alongside someone in their suffering. This is exactly what compassion is when practiced in everyday life. It is recognising that the other has a real and actual life, even if I know little about it. And that in this life they experience similarly the fragility, vulnerability, joy, delight, desire and woundedness that I experience. We need to treat each other with care. We are susceptible to pain and hurt.

We experience ourselves as separate creatures, as Einstein states in the quotation at the top of this blog, but this is a delusion – and it makes us prisoners walled in by a one-dimensional life made up of our own limited experience and emotions. In order to break out of this prison we have to get enough distance from our own emotions (practice what is called ‘dispassion’) to be able to see the other person. Then, with imagination and a heart that longs to reach out to the other, we consciously try to see them in their own reality.

“Jesus, Thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love Thou art.” Thus go the words from the much loved hymn. Truly, this is the Jesus we meet in the gospels. Jesus sees people, always has time for people. You never get the feeling that he discounts anyone: doesn’t acknowledge them. Yes, he gets impatient on a few occasions, usually with his disciples because they are so slow in understanding. But having expressed his frustration he goes on working with them, bearing with them, teaching them and loving them to the end.

“God became man, so that man might become God.” (Athanasius) This is real compassion – getting into our humanity utterly and seeing life from our point of view.

We want to create a context of dignity for suffering people. To do so, it is essential to put our fingers on the pulse of our own hearts and make sure our own context of dignity is intact.

Roshi Joan Halifax

We are very mixed up kids.  So much in the news points to how mixed up we are.  The other day a photograph was put out on a television programme of an American teenage girl aged about 16 or 17, posing with a rifle in one hand and a bible in the other.  After we had had a moment to take that in another picture was placed beside the first one, of a young Jihadist girl in exactly the same pose as the American girl held and of about the same age, holding a rifle in one hand and a copy of the Koran in the other.  There didn’t need to be any commentary.  The pictures were better than a thousand words.

 

I lived in the USA for a year from 1966 to 1967 and loved it although in some ways it was a fearsome time.  My father was teaching at an American college.  Although it was in the east, in Pennsylvania, tensions between some of the black and white students were so heightened that there was a curfew in the town every night from 11pm onwards.  It was the middle of the Vietnam War.  I met a student who went off to the war and came back in a wheelchair.  Both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in those twelve months.  And, as usual, the reaction to the shootings was that something needed to be done about the ease with which people could buy a gun in the US, whilst those against gun control shouted as loudly from the opposite corner.  There was a bumper sticker that was very popular on cars at this time.  It said,

 

God and guns made this country great.  Let’s keep it that way.

 

Here’s another bit of news that shows how mixed up we are.  Today we heard from an Oxfam report that the richest one percent of all the people in the world will soon own as much as the other ninety-nine percent and that eighty-five people in this world are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world.  This seems absolutely outrageous and almost unbelievable.  But Oxfam tells us it is the case, and of course, along with money goes power.

 

What would Jesus say?

 

We in the west and we who are so well heeled are so good at taking the moral high ground, but, as the quotation by Roshi Joan Halifax at the top of this blog says if we (really) want to create a context of dignity for suffering people, we have to look at ourselves first.  It is no use our pointing to the speck of dust in someone else’s eye when we have a log in our own.  It is no use bemoaning the injustice in the world when we are part of that injustice and do not see it and then having seen it, do not speak out against it.  One of the greatest indignities we place on suffering people is to see them as charitable cases rather than human beings who have a right to live decent lives.  We need to look at ourselves and see how in need we are of charity.  Someone needs to help us to face ourselves and learn that we have a lot to learn about being really human, human beings.  Thanks be to God, for Jesus Christ!

 

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

Marcus Aurelius