A Reflection for the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Outer Banks October 21, 2018 Thomas E Wilson, Guest Preacher
Transfiguring Suffering Into Compassion
This last week Eugene Peterson, a Retired Presbyterian Minister,
Teacher, BiblicalTranslator, Poet and Writer entered into Hospice
Care. When his children asked him how he felt about entering the last
months of his life, he said; “I feel pretty good about that.”Before I retired five months ago I considered part of my Priestly duties as Rector of All Saints Episcopal was the volunteering to be a Chaplain with the Dare County Hospice program. What Hospice does is help people deal with death. In an ego agenda driven world death seems like a suffering but faith looks at death differently. What the hospice idea is to transform the suffering of death into a loving struggle for compassion. Transformation into compassion as a way of life is hard for us to get our heads around. Pat, my wife, grew up in Parochial schools and whenever she would get a disappointment, pain or hurt, the nuns would say “Offer it up!” She with fury dismissed it as pious nonsense and I have learned not to ever offer that piece of advice to her. However, that is the point of my reflection today!
I am indebted to Eugene Peterson because his Biblical Translation, The Message, is an attempt to present the Bible in language fit for real dog-faced people rather than as Preachers trying to impress you with their language. His translation of Micah is a case in point. Micah wasn't a professional prophet, he worked as a farm laborer taking care of Sycamore Trees telling people what he learned about being still in his Spirit with the Power Greater than Himself. Listen to Micah 6:8 “But he’s already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love and don’t take yourself too seriously— take God seriously.”
“Do what is fair and just to your
neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love and don’t take
yourself too seriously— take God seriously.” I am in pretty good
health right now but I would like think that I might be able to face
my own death seeing it as part of life, like St. Francis of Assisi
who considered death a sister. His early life was self centered but
he grew into a life filled with compassion. I am still working on it.
I am reminded of a piece of graffiti that Erik Erickson quoted at
the beginning of one of his books on Human Development: “I ain't
who I should be, I ain't what I could be, but thank God I ain't who I
used to be.”
I grew up self centered like, I guess,
more than a few of us in this room. The world revolved around me and
what I wanted and therefore I thought that if I didn't get what I
wanted then the world was unfair and owed me an apology and I would
throw a pity party.
Last week I did a reflection for an
Episcopal Church in Engelhard and I started off with an experience of
building a crystal radio set when I was in 4th grade. I
guess I am still stuck in the 4th grade because when I
started thinking about my history of compassion I found myself smack
back in the 4th grade. It was summer time and I was in
short pants and walking down the road and I noticed a pile of
something on the side of the pavement. I walked toward it and found a
bird and it was still, very still because it was dead. I looked at it
and I started to cry because that bird should not be dead. I can't
even remember what kind of bird it was, but I thought it was
beautiful and it seemed wrong that such beauty was ruined. The
picture I have is of me as a child squatting on the side of the road
crying. It could have been the beginning of compassion for me but it
was just pity; pity for the bird and pity for me having to deal with
it. However, I did not do a thing as an act of love and thankfulness
for the joy the bird had given others in this world. If I had
compassion I would have buried the bird and said a prayer of
thanksgiving, maybe put up a sign for motorists to slow down to the
speed limit so animals might stand a chance. Sometimes pity
masquerades as compassion but it isn't. While it is better than
complete self absorption, pity looks and sees an object rather that a
being, a thing without any real connection to our lives. Using Pity
can work to raise money as long as we are only asking for small
change but usually pity meets the definition of “no change means no
change”. Pity will not change lives or meaningful behavior. And if
pity stays around, it usually breeds resentment in the targeted
observer.
The next movement toward compassion
that I remember was in the 6th grade. My elementary school
was dealing with an influx of children in the baby boomer generation
and the administration had to build a new wing which was to be build
over the summer, but it was not finished and the solution was to bus
the fourth, fifth and sixth graders over to some empty classrooms
near another school in the district. Most of us kids walked to school
but now we had to ride the buses. On the bus I was riding was a
retarded boy named Karl. Nobody sat next to him because he was
different. I did not want to sit next to him, but that was the seat
that was available. Talking to him was difficult but I treated him
like a human being because my parent had drilled it into us that we
needed to be kind and respectful, so I listened to what he had to say
or what I could understand.
After we got off the bus, some of the
other kids laughed at me and said I probably got “cooties” from
Karl. For those of you who are in the dark; cooties are imaginary
creatures that infest children when in contact with someone who is
different. I knew what some of the kids were doing, they wanted me to
share their fear and shun Karl. I continued to sit next to Karl and
it was not out of pity but out of doing good deeds to another human
being as I would have wanted someone to stick up for me if I was in
that same kind of situation. It was kindness with a little empathy,
but it was not yet compassion because it required nothing from me
than my small personal time and energy. I did not want to share his
suffering. So I kept him at a polite distance.
Later in life I would stand up in
demonstrations against Racism, War and Capital Punishment; not
because I cared about the people but because it was the “right”
thing to do in being kind and respectful. I would do the same thing
with many of the jobs when I started a career, jobs
I had in order to put bread on the table. These were jobs, not life,
and there was a sharp division between my job and my life. The
understanding was my empathy was confined to the office sessions and
it I was to run across the client outside the office, I was to keep
a professional distance and not speak to them unless they spoke to me
and I was not to let a conversation about problems continue. My job
was identifying, and working with people's problems for which I was
paid. This continued even for the first years of my ordained
ministry. At the end of the office hours, I often went home exhausted
if I had not given myself enough time to work on Counter
Transference.
The Dalai Lama in his book:
The Essence of the Heart Sutra, writes:
"According to Buddhism, compassion is an aspiration, a state of
mind, wanting others to be free from suffering. It's not passive —
it's not empathy alone — but rather an empathetic altruism that
actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion
must have both wisdom and lovingkindness. That is to say, one must
understand the nature of the suffering from which we wish to free
others (this is wisdom), and one must experience deep intimacy and
empathy with other sentient beings (this is lovingkindness)."
Empathy is the
exercise of imagination to begin to understand the joys and suffering
of another human being. It is something I learned more when I did
some acting to try to get inside and understand characters I played.
Empathy is not the schizophrenic identification of another person but
the awareness of how parts of me are found in parts of the other. I
never lapsed into mental illness and became the character; the
character was not me but yet the character was also not not me for he
did contain more than a little of my shadows, both light and dark.
Twelve step groups are places of compassion. Visitors are not greeted as solitary losers on which to have pity but as sufferers who are invited to be fellow strugglers, transforming their suffering into struggle.
Struggle is what we are called to do to claim the world. The Prophet Mohammad is reported to have said after a battle: “We have finished with the Lesser Jihad and it is now time for the Greater Jihad” The lesser Jihad is always easy as we find enemies as an excuse for blaming someone for our suffering. But the harder, The Greater, Jihad, struggle, meant the struggle to be a better person and to create a better community of justice and care in the image of Allah the Compassionate and Merciful.
The Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, having lived a pampered life, finally left the Palace of ease and found the suffering of the world and life. He knew that there was suffering everywhere and it was never noble but always meaningless. However, it could be transformed and made meaningful when it was replaced by struggle on the Eightfold Path. When some of his disciples asked what they could do if they found themselves in a land of famine; he replied that if they were in the middle of famine they could fast; replacing the suffering with struggle for deeper meaning of compassion.
Jesus answered the question about what his disciples could do if someone hits them on the right cheek. The only way that someone in a society, that is mainly right handed, hits you on the right cheek, is when he does a back handed slap, an insult from someone who considers you not worth their time and beneath their contempt. A Jew in an Roman occupied territory as Jesus was, or one had less social or economic status and power as Jesus was, had three choices. One; they could fight back and end up killed by the powers that be. Two; they could stuff down the insult and live with the bitterness for the enemy and self loathing of their own inaction. Three: they could stand in front of the aggressor and offer the other cheek to be hit so the oppressor would be aware of what he was doing, injuring a fellow image of God , a person not an object. As a Christian I would call it a Transfiguration into Compassion, others might call it a Transformation. This is what caused the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to do his ministry as a way to have the enemy see what they were doing to another human being. It was an act of defiance and an act of loving compassion for the enemy's soul. The suffering turned into struggle for growth for deeper life.
Jean Vanier, the founder of a worldwide collection of communities where people work and live with people with developmental disabilities and where people learn how to be compassionately human with each other, said in his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize in 2015:
“It is only as we meet and share
together person to person, eye to eye, and heart to heart that we
discover what it means to be human and to discover the joy of being
together, working together towards a common mission of peace and
unity. It is only moving from winning and loneliness to
collaboration, and from hostility to seeing enemies as friends, that
we discover the real meaning of peace.”
The world is not going to be changed by divisions of enemy camps
hurling invective at each other at the latest enemies to blame, but
by joining with the enemies and decide that we/they need to
transform the suffering we feed into a struggle together for the
common good with compassion for all.Today for instance we see a great deal of suffering because of the two recent hurricanes. We have choices on how to respond. We can breath a sigh of relief and have pity on the people who are suffering who made the bad choice to live somewhere else, or we can respond to suffering with love and help transform it into a struggle for compassion.
How about you? How are you doing with compassion?
Transfiguring Suffering Into Compassion.
What a nun says I didn't want to do,
when she suggests that I offer it up,
but I just want to invite pain to sup,
giving my unjust suffering its due.
Oh, the joy of it all, to pin a blame
on someone rather than life or me;
there must be a devil or an enemy
that I can make to suffer or shame.
But what if it is part of living itself,
unavoidable with all our ego drives
determined to separate all our lives
by putting our neighbors on a shelf?
Join us to struggle for a compassion
as way to put suffering out of fashion.
A Reflection and Poem on Compassion as a Transfiguration of Suffering.
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