The Need for Compassion
We are part of something sacred, omnipresent and immeasurable. And when we experience being part of this throbbing, pulsating Source of the whole of life, we realise how grateful we need to be for the gift of life given to each of us. Just to experience the wondrousness of life. As Gerard Manley Hopkins stated,
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
There is Beauty in Ugliness
We begin to see the beauty of life. There is perfection in imperfection. Nature is filled with asymmetrical symmetry. Like oddly bent trees and irregular shaped clouds and craggy canyons. It is as if God has created beauty in irregularity. It is similar to an artist creating a painting in which the haphazard dribbling of paint is made to create an effect of immense beauty. Life is made up of boundless variety, behaving in a seemingly random manner, yet giving rise to incomparable magnificence. Something which Joseph Needham calls an “organic pattern”.
All our blunders, foibles and infirmities are no longer looked upon with disgust. Instead they become opportunities to grow the beauty of this life gifted to us. We befriend the unlikeable part of our nature. We don’t reject it because it will persist in its repulsiveness. Just like in judo we control ourselves by cooperating with ourselves. We forgive ourselves. We accept ourselves. The unlikeable gets accepted and transformed. “There is power in the winning of nature by love”.
The man with no arms begins painting with his legs. The fat person becomes lovable and the person who has suffered severe burns to her face becomes a model and begins walking the ramp for fashion shows. One’s ugliness becomes one’s beauty. One’s blemishes get celebrated. And handicaps become opportunities. This is not only applicable to our physical aspects.
Allowing Compassion to arise from Suffering
All of us in some way have experienced being disappointed, humiliated, abandoned, ignored, and lonely. These are our internal wounds which very often remain raw because we have not seen them as opportunities to give birth to compassion for others and the whole of life. It is too painful. But birth is always painful. Trungpa Rinpoche calls these sore spots of our life the “embryo of compassion stirring to be born”. This is the difficult part, to allow compassion to be born within us in spite of everything that’s happened to us. We need to see our vulnerability as our strength. We need to forgive. Our suffering becomes an education in compassion.
The lotus needs the slushy swamp to grow. Without the slushy swamp there will not be any lotus flowers. From the swamp of our suffering arises a heart of compassion. Suffering makes us realise what is essential. Suffering takes away our utopian world of self- sufficiency. Makes us feel the reality of who we are. We need to be grateful to our suffering. In fact, gratitude for everything that befalls us opens the doorway to becoming a compassionate person.
We begin to see that we are not the only ones who are suffering. We suffer in and through others inasmuch as others suffer in and through us. We become aware of how we are causing our own suffering and the suffering of others. Compassion makes us more forgiving and understanding. It is the way to communicate with this broken world and our broken selves.
What is Compassion?
As Karen Armstrong explains “Compassion” derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo, or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure (something) with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view.”
Compassion in Professions
In 2006 all medical schools in Israel made it mandatory in their admission procedure that every entering medical student have the qualities of compassion and empathy. “It bothered us,” said Professor Moshe Mittelman, head of the admissions committee at Tel Aviv University, “that here and there you meet a doctor about whom you say, “He may know medicine, but he is not a decent human being.” We are a school that educates people to work in the medical profession, which is not only science but also humanism and dealing with people.”
Inoculating Ourselves against Feeling the Pain of Others
There is a natural sympathy which is built within us. We can’t but help feel bad when we see somebody injured or suffering. But today we are gradually inoculating ourselves against this feeling. When we see somebody in an accident instead of caring for the person in whatever way we can we are more interested in taking a pic and posting it on social media. We need what the Tibetans call shen dug ngal wa la mi so pa which means “the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow.” Where we can’t ignore people in distress.
Compassion can Transform this Broken World
However, very often when we want to show compassion, we irritate people by telling them to be positive instead of allowing them to share with us their deepest grief because possibly deep down we know we will not be able to handle listening to their pain. We are not willing to give the other a ‘compassionate listening’. How can we heal if we are not willing to listen! We need to experience the fact that we will not change the world by what we do but by whom we become. Compassion makes us into human persons. It makes us other centred. It makes us experience what Martin Luther King Jr. said,
“All life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
This is like this because that is like that. The world will get transformed only through compassion.
“The world is love to him who treats it as such, even when it torments and destroys him”.
