Hoping for peace — we must celebrate compassion and love each other through challenging times

My latest before-bed reading is the first novel of Lancali, pen name for Lou-Andrea Callewaert. The title is, “I Fell in Love with Hope.”

It’s a story of several young friends in a hospital for the terminally ill. One has just a single lung. Another has a broken spine and an abusive father. All have bodily issues that keep them institutionalized.

They love the challenges of escaping their environment, of stealing chocolate and apples, of spending nights on the roof looking at the stars. The story shares intense and immobilizing grief, special times of love and joy; but most significant for this reflection, encompassing compassion. 

Com-passion! We’ve lost it in the commercialization of our lives. Those three letters “com,” used to be used as a prefix that meant “with,” “together,” “in association,” “completely.” Or, one thinks of “combine,” “compare,” and “comingle.” They were all reflective of the best in human relationships.

These days we are more likely to see those letters used in com-mercial or com-mander or com-puter or com-mittee or com-merce. We are distanced from the qualities of com-passion, like: speaking with kindness; listening carefully without judgment; encouraging another; offering to help; celebrating the success of another; accepting people for who they are; being fully present!

Perhaps it’s because the characters in Lancali’s story are suffering themselves, they are so compassionate with each other. One holds the hand of another for hours, so they know they are not alone. It made me remember the time I was calling on one of my church members in a nursing home.

He was holding my hand so tightly it hurt. He was not conscious and I knew he was near death.

But after several minutes I had to remove my hand, only able to do so using my other hand as leverage. Perhaps if I had experienced his depth of suffering, I would have left my hand in his until my hand went numb and his spirit left the body. But I had places to go and things to do! And I wasn’t institutionalized with him.

Our experience likely suggests that compassion is not a given. We aren’t born with it. It needs to be cultivated and it probably develops best if we’ve been recipients. But neuroscience tells us something different. Compassion is innate to the human being and can be learned and enhanced. It is present in all of us and simply needs to be used.

And it makes sense that those who know suffering themselves, are least afraid of seeing and engaging the suffering of others.

Compassion is such a powerful word! The prefix connects us in a strong and intimate way with each other, and the rest of the word is as strong and active as possible. We are passionate!

I felt passionate the other day when I learned Israel bombed the Hahn Younis Camp in Gaza. In order to remove the second in command of Hamas, first reports told us 71 were killed and 300 wounded. It’s still unclear whether the Hamas commander was killed. (His wife and two children were killed earlier). 

Apparently the IDF was quite certain there were no Israeli hostages present or they wouldn’t have dropped the explosive. They knew Palestinians would be present, as they were in a “Designated Safe Zone,” declared such by the Israeli government. Three hundred seventy one (and more) could be sacrificed for the death of one.

Some say it was a “made in the USA” bomb. We’ve sent so many, it might well have been. 

What have we come to as a human community? Where is the compassion, looking at all those body bags with children in them; compassion for the wailing mothers; for the weeping fathers? Why do we allow our leaders to continue to recite the creeds of warriors and weapons makers when they claim the creed of Jesus Christ?

It’s ironic that power, privilege, wealth and good health, seem to make it harder to be compassionate. All of those things we seem to value in a materialistic society seem to make us more hard-hearted. We can look at the suffering of immigrants fleeing violence and poverty and call them rapists and terrorists and send them back home.

We can see the homeless on the street and treat them like trash. We can watch the news of the day and hardly be touched by the “feel-good” story at the end of the newscast. 

So many others say it better than I. Let me quote just a few.

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. ” ― Martin Luther King Jr. (seen above in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in public domain image posted on wikimedia commons)

“Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.” – Frederick Buechner

“Instead of putting others in their place, put yourself in their place.” – Amish proverb

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”  ― Dalai Lama XIV

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”  ― Pema Chödrön

This last quotation best describes the characters in “I Fell in Love with Hope.” They know darkness and can share in the darkness of others. We might try harder to do the same.

Carl Kline of Brookings is a United Church of Christ clergyman and adjunct faculty member at the Mt. Marty College campus in Watertown. He is a founder and on the planning committee of the Brookings Interfaith Council, co-founder of Nonviolent Alternatives, a small not-for-profit that, for 15 years, provided intercultural experiences with Lakota/Dakota people in the Northern Plains and brought conflict resolution and peer mediation programs to schools around the region. He was one of the early participants in the development of Peace Brigades International. Kline can be reached at carl@satyagrahainstitute.org. This column originally appeared in the Brookings Register.