Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, October 17, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
Compassion II:
Please Understand Me!
“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases….And by his bruises we are healed.”
(Isaiah 53:4-12)
“[His angels] shall bear you in their hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone….Because he is bound to me in love…I will protect him” (Psalm 91:12,14)
“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Mark 10:45)
From one of my favorite movie musicals, Damn Yankees, they sing,
You’ve gotta have heart/
all you really need is heart./
When the odds are sayin’ you’ll never win/
That’s when the grin should start./
All you really need is heart!”
And it is in the heart where love is born and resides. It is the mixing bowl out of which comes the most important thing. In fact, to pick up and repeat last week’s theme, there is one need and one wish that every human being has, and that is the need and the wish to be loved and to love. And I further claim that this love is all we need. All you need is love, lots and lots and lots of love. Is there ever enough love? Only if you place a limit on it. It flows like the sun shines. There is no stopping it and no way of stopping it.
Compassion is another word for love. And compassion is the subject of this series of meditations. As the Dalai Lama sings, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
Compassion is perhaps the richest, deepest and most challenging of those other-directed emotional words, including the words “sympathy” and “empathy.”
Let’s look briefly at those words. “Sympathy” is the socially acceptable, Kindergarten-level way of expressing care and concern. “I sympathize with you.” “I am simpatico with what you are feeling.” “I get where you’re at!” Empathy takes it further. It enters into understanding of another’s pain or predicament. It is free of judgment, perhaps the hardest quality to cultivate seeing how most of us love to judge people for where they are in their lives. How often have we thought that someone “complains too much,” “must be a hypochondriac” (as if we were qualified physicians), “should be over their grieving by now,” (as if we were in charge of someone’s emotional timeline). Empathy simply stands alongside someone else, free of judgment, hopefully short on advice, and, if we want to do our friend a big favor, keeping our mouth shut…tight! Empathy is like when someone is stuck inside a dark hole and we might shout down, “Hey, I know what it’s like down there.” Empathy: feeling with someone.
Compassion is a kind of post-graduate caring, for it not only identifies with someone’s predicament, it shares its love with that person through its own suffering. “Passion,” as we saw last week, comes from the Latin for suffering. I link with your suffering through my suffering. We are brothers in our shared humanity. That is compassion.
And the reason compassion is such a beautiful reality in the Christian life is because we look to the one Jesus who not just stands with us in our suffering, but who takes on our suffering. He is that close to us. A parent, a sibling, a close, close friend can feel intensely our pain as they sit with us in compassion. But our Lord Jesus takes our suffering into himself. This is the meaning of incarnation, and this is the meaning of salvation. Salvation means healing.
I want to focus for a brief time on a key ingredient of this wonderful action of compassion. Compassion is not just a feeling. It is also an action. It involves our words, our attitudes, and our actions toward another. And in order for this compassion to take flight, to have real meat on its bones, it must involve understanding. Without understanding, we are flying blind and are apt to come to wrong conclusions about a person’s situation…and, yes, judge it!
Most people, let’s face it, are facing their own struggles. They may not show it and for sure they may not want you to know that they struggle. For some reason struggle seems to be a sign of weakness. We can assume pretty accurately that almost everybody is shy and hiding to some degree behind unspoken sorrow, pain and fear. Making this assumption is halfway home to understanding and opens the love valve and makes genuine compassion possible.
In addition to most people facing their own inner struggles and demons, those same people are doing about the best they can to cope with what is in front of them. We can in our arrogance claim that they are lazy. We may ask ourselves, just why are they not doing what I know would help them; just why don’t they stop their drinking and creating such chaos in their families. Good questions, but useless, uncaring questions. Because people are doing what they are doing. And that is the end of the story. We can cajole, wring our hands and judge all we want. As they will do it their way…until the cows come home. Moo.
They’re home. Now what? Moo, moo, moo.
Where’s the love?
I know there are examples in your lives when things changed radically when you began to understand more fully exactly where someone was coming from. We stopped being a psychic and filling in the blanks about a person’s life and saw the truth. Love starts the minute we step down from the judge’s bench.
My favorite story about this is of two children who seemed to be accompanied by a priest were on a subway one busy morning. The kids were running wild throughout the subway car, chasing one another, bumping into the standing passengers. There were glaring eyes and hushed curses as the children continued to squeal and run. Finally, one of the passengers came over to the seated priest and demanded, “Can’t you do something about these children?”
“I suppose so,” the priest replied, “but we’ve just come from their mother’s funeral, and I thought I would cut them some slack. I’m sorry for their behavior.”
You see how this simple explanation, which leads to understanding, can change everything. Judgment turns to compassion. I believe if we understood everything as fully as Christ did, we would shed tears, we would wail so loudly, that the heavens would hear our cries.
Someone said the other day, “Change only comes about with love.” Yes, and I would add understanding is the icing on the cake of love, for now we know more fully.”
Compassion is entering into the suffering of the world. This entryway leads to a love that brings peace and joy, and yes, laughter through the tears.
I read this week that we are “hard-wired for compassion.” This may be true. I’m not sure. There is the condition known as sociopathy. And society does teach us to fear and separate ourselves from others.
But one thing we can do is to remember—re-member!—those times when we were understood. Those recollections can trigger or retrigger an outgoing of our love.
What do you think about this? A friend put it this way: “When I love, it’s always in response to being loved.” Wow, what a great way of putting it. “When I love, it’s always in response to being loved.” We are loved. We Christians know it, or at least we had better know it. That is what all the angels shouting the good news was about. This is what our Eucharist meal is about: a love so great it envelops, surrounds, precedes and follows us every moment of our lives.
A Hindu saying is this: “Extend your awareness into the bodies of other living beings. Feel what those others are feeling. Leave aside your body and its needs. Abandon being so local. Day by day, constrictions will loosen as you become attuned to the current of life flowing through us all.”
All we need is love. Love is the divine emotion. Love is the emotion of God. Love is the being of God. And it is ours for the taking.
Amen.