Results tagged “compassion” from Marilyn Sewell

Everybody's hurting--economically, I mean.  Or at least, they think they are.  Rich people, poor people, and all the people in between.  And cities and states are slashing their budgets drastically, as well.  But let's stop kidding ourselves: who is really taking the hit?  It's, as per usual, the most vulnerable in our society.  The cuts come in education and in services to poor people.  Health care for indigent families gets sliced, and college loans for young people who want to better themselves.

I read in the newspaper that in tight times, the call for cosmetic surgery is down.  It appears that 25 percent fewer people since 2007 want to have their fat siphoned off with liposuction.  Twenty-one percent fewer want their stomachs "tucked."  Breast augmentation is still, well, relatively big, with a loss of only 11 percent. 

So one woman is complaining because she can't really afford that blepharoplasty (that would be "eyelid surgery") this year, while another woman is wondering how she's going to feed her children that evening, if she pays the electric bill. 

Imagine this: a group of people are on a luxury liner cruising the ocean, and they suddenly see a small craft, sinking in rough water, the family on board calling for help.  Would the liner just cruise past, with the passengers complaining about the minor jostling of the rough sea--or would they do everything possible to save the family?

Or suppose a well-to-do family went on a picnic, and on their grassy path, they came upon children who had not eaten all that day and who were asking for food.  Would not they open their bulging picnic basket and share their food with these children?

Sometimes I think those of us who have plenty simply suffer from lack of imagination.  We somehow have the idea that we deserve what we have.  Who deserves anything at all?  We live through grace and the work of many others.  Or another way of looking at it--who does not deserve?  Who does not deserve food and shelter?  Which human beings do not deserve this?

People say, "I work hard!"  I say I know people who work twice as hard and don't make enough to live on.  People say, "Poor people are just lazy," and I think of the young Hispanic man who is busing their table at the restaurant, or the maid from Puerto Rico who is cleaning their toilet in the hotel, and who will take the bus home late at night to a small rented house where eight others live. 

Perhaps compassion comes down to nothing more than specifics.  Numbers, statistics--how boring!  So let us leave the abstract and be present with the real.  Let us notice the hole in the shoe, the fly on the wound, the limp in the walk, the shout in the night.  Let us notice, and care.

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During Archbishop TuTu's recent visit to Portland, some of us were asked to participate in panel discussions on several related topics.  I was asked to be on a panel entitled "Religion as a Bridge to Reconciliation."  The following is part of what I said in my introductory remarks:

The word religion comes from the prefix re, meaning back and the Latin ligare, which means "to bind" or "to bind back" or "to reconnect."  One might say that the function of religion is to repair the illusion of our separation.  Religion should play a natural, a logical role in reconciliation--to bind us together in common values of love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.

Unfortunately, religion--and I can speak with real authority only of the Christian religion, which is my own--religion most often seems to do the opposite: it serves to separate and to divide.  Christianity has such a bad reputation that the very use of the word in the common vernacular connotes "one who is rigid in belief," and people who are not religious are wary of those who are, for these unconverted individuals--those unwashed in the blood, so to speak--too often have been targets for conversion and have not been respected as the persons, theological and otherwise, that they are.

Of course, all religious people are not Fundamentalists by any means, but even so, when any group of people begin to say, "My way is the way, my path is the only path," the result is division and acrimony.

In fact, religion then becomes no different in this way from any other ideology, whethers an idealogy of communism or capitalism or racism or deconstructionist thinking.  One who becomes an ideologist, or a true believer, begins to exist in a closed system.  Whatever fits into this chosen system is labeled "true" and whatever does not is labeled "false."  The curiosity, spontaneity, and growth of such an individual become limited.

Because each of us is troubled by a multitude of interior forces we do not and will not ever totally understand, it is our nature to look for a system which explains our angst and which makes us feel safe within the walls of that system.  We do not see that system as arbitrary, as created by humans who are terrified of our own inevitable demise, and so we reify those structures--that is, we come to believe that there is a concrete reality there.  Therefore, we cling to these beliefs as to life itself, and whatever threatens them must be challenged--or perhaps stemped out, eliminated.

Given this very human and very pervasive problem with religion, one can see why religion often fails to be a sturdy instrument of reconciliation.  At the same time, we know that there have been instances when it has been.  I'm thinking of enlightened leaders who have internalized the radical way of being that seems to be at the heart of all major religions--the radical way of love, compassion, peace.  Violence and retribution have no part to play.  I'm thinking, for example, for Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught non-violence in the Civil Rights movement; or Gandhi, who practiced satyagraha, or passive resistance, to free his people from British rule; or a more recent example, the Amish, who forgave the man who gunned down their children in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse a few years ago, because these gentle people could do no other: forgiveness is their way of being.

So if we mean by religion, a spiritual commitment to love and compassion and non-violence--if we mean by religion, a radical change of being in which the individual or community understands that we are all one and that love and forgiveness are central to their being, then yes, religion is the essence of reconciliation and a path to that difficult state.

But if we mean by religion--which we generally do--an institutionalized set of beliefs, then, no, just the opposite.  For religion in that sense divides people into the righteous and the unrighteous, the saved and the unsaved, the good and the evil.  And of course if we have made "the other" evil, then the righteous must have control over the evil ones.  We righteous ones can then project all of our shadow side onto these evil ones, and then Christians can smile as we say things to gays and lesbians like, "I hate the sin, but love the sinner," or say to those of another faith tradition, "If you haven't accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you're going to hell."  Not to mention the generations of wars between believers of various faiths throughout the world, throughout all time.  Make the people of a different tribe or race or religion "other," and they are much easier to kill.

So is religion a path to reconciliation?  Not until its practititioners mature as religious beings.  Not until its institutions become more devoted to the heart-lessons of their prophets than to the divisive theology of their true believers.

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