Adding Compassion

You might not expect to hear me say this, but I almost didn’t add the word “compassion” to my title phrase – even though “all you need is love” and “the greatest of these is love” and “there is no other commandment greater [than love]” (to quote the Beatles, St. Paul and Jesus all at once as one should on an Easter Monday).

Here are a couple of reasons for my hesitation: 1) The left hemisphere of my brain looks at the data and wonders if “emotional regulation” might be (seems to be?) more empirically necessary than compassion when it comes to things like healing from trauma, 2) In some post soon, I’ll be wanting to clarify that I believe that reality itself is immersed in compassion, even as it also includes great pain and suffering. So, is it redundant to add the word “compassion”?

But I’ve already told you that I’m trying to shut my left hemisphere up (or, put it in the back seat at least), and, in the end, I decided it was too important to skip, even though the addition leads to some grammatical ambiguity as I’ll explain later. But first, I want to say that when I refer to “compassionate” I mean “the presence of a love that enables trust and courage even in the face of suffering.” You’ll notice how “suffering” keeps slipping into this, and if you’re etymologically astute you may have recalled by now that compassion has its literal origin in “suffering with.” Compassion is the kind of love that is able and willing to be present with someone in their suffering, and the focus is being present “for” someone, without agenda or false promises or temptations of power. And experiencing and trusting that kind of caring presence is central to our healing and maturing. This may sound idealistic, and you may be saying to yourself that this would be nice in a perfect world, but I’m saying that this compassion is all around us. (Apparently, I should also have included Four Weddings and a Funeral among my sources for opening quotes – please forgive me if my movie references are aimed at seniors.)

Now before I get to the scintillating confession of my grammatical inconsistency (can you wait!?) and to unpacking how my belief that “love is all around us” is more than a movie cliché, let me clarify whose compassion we’re talking about. All of the following participants are important for our compassionate consent to reality. Note that I will not be describing the compassion that I see in a manner aimed at convincing the sceptic – something that rarely happens through words anyway. I am simply describing what I’ve seen and understood.

First there is us. Yes, I know we nearly all suck at self-compassion. Or at least we’re very inconsistent at it. We slip into self-hatred when looking at our mistakes and weaknesses. We harm ourselves and self-sabotage in countless ways. All true. But, we want to care for ourselves. We really do. The seeds of self-compassion are there. We want to hang in there through the hard parts and experience some real joy and beauty together with others. And we want to have compassion for these others too!¹ Even though we might be terrible at it and haven’t a clue how to start seeing past our own pain or breaking out of our ruts to live out compassion for others. It’s there in us – weak and undeveloped, maybe, but sometimes this compassion in us shows itself. As a therapist, it’s fascinating for me to see how much self-compassion we’re capable of when there is some guidance and encouragement to take it seriously. (And if you’ve never heard of Kristin Neff’s material on self-compassion and her very practical exercises, please do look them up and experiment with them!)

Compassion is present in others around us. For some of us there is a lot of compassion around us, and family, friends and maybe even a community are quite good at it. For others, it may pop up only occasionally in otherwise grim circumstances. Perhaps isolation or the most dysfunctional of families make it seem like a distant dream, but compassion can still be sought. Support groups, interest groups, church communities, and professional care will all offer some level of compassion to the seeker.

For those of us who have come to trust, to hope, to experience this – there is also a spiritual Presence of Love that is always with us, a Presence “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Yes, there may be enough terrible concepts of judging, vengeful gods out there so that we have all, rightly, been tempted by atheism - rejection of those unhelpful God-concepts. This is wisdom and discernment, not “spiritual doubt” - such violent and punitive gods are not worthy of belief. There have been so many lousy understandings of hell, manipulatively taught for personal and institutional agendas, that it’s a miracle that any of us still believe in a God whose essence is Love. But many of us still do. And I see this Presence in each of us, enlivening our own compassion and that of others.

Here are a couple, of many, reasons that have contributed to my own trust in this. My doctoral research focused on the practice of “inner healing prayer.” In a nutshell, this is imaginative prayer in which people are invited to encounter the traumas and memories that have hurt them and kept them stuck. But the memories or fears are encountered in the Presence of Love. In the midst of recalling their pain, people are invited to become aware of that Presence by imagining God, or God’s Spirit, or Jesus being there with them in whatever way makes sense to them and then to let their imagination of that Presence affect their experience of the memory – to listen or see or simply become aware of any difference that Presence makes or any new thoughts or intuitions they have about it all. In general, the outcomes range from some small comfort to life-changing healing. I’ve seen people with diverse spiritual backgrounds or none have striking encounters with a Loving Presence that freed them from a memory that may have caused years of shame or bitterness. With some experience of this over thirty years, I still find it shocking that only twice have I witnessed someone imagining a presence that was not loving and wise – and these were both obvious projections from family history. Maybe a handful of others were unable to imagine much of anything. But almost everyone was able to experience the presence of a Love that had some transforming influence on their wounds. It seems like a capacity we all have that is often ignored.

The other, very different, reason for me is my experience of learning from other faith traditions, especially Buddhism. Most Buddhist understandings lean away from any belief in a divine personality, and so there is no talk of “God’s love.” And yet one of the strongest associations of those who have come to experience the Oneness and spiritual connection possible through Buddhist meditation is the enablement of compassion for all beings. In fact, one of the specific contemplative practices that has had an overwhelming amount of empirical research demonstrating its positive affects on mental, physical and spiritual health is the practice of “lovingkindness meditation” (or metta).

Personally, I suspect that the Mystery of Love that pervades our universe is pretty flexible on details if we are being drawn toward compassion.

So, if we are surrounded by a spiritual compassion, and if there are at least grains of compassion available in others and in ourselves, why do we often experience the absence of compassion? I think it may be that our experience of compassion is always so limited, so mixed. There is some compassion, but also self-interest and personal agendas. So we don’t trust it. Our friends and families may have personal weaknesses and shortcomings of their own, and we may not trust them with our vulnerabilities. And even spiritual compassion has experiential limitations. It falls short when our expectations are for a Divine Force, the genie in our bottle, who will, on demand, prevent any suffering and provide immediate vindication from our enemies. If we don’t let go of that false hope, we can’t receive compassion from a Presence whose potency is about always being “for us,” willingly suffering “with us.” A future post will explore this dilemma further.

For now, let’s get back to my title phrase: “a compassionate consent to reality.” For compassion to enable my consent to reality it must enable trust and courage in the face of suffering so that I can risk opening myself up to an encounter with “what is.” I can’t make imperfect compassion perfect or mixed compassion pure. But I can be intentional about seeking more reliable compassion for the hard moments in the process. For those steps that are beyond my self-compassion, or that of my friends, I may need to seek professional compassion from a therapist, counsellor or spiritual director. These people are all accountable to professional codes of ethics, which are basically wordy substitutes for ensuring there is some reliable compassion (when combined with, perhaps, a recommendation or your own gut feeling after a first session).

And here is my confession of grammatical inadequacy: I mean too many things for all the grammar in my phrase to work. I’m unwilling to limit my meaning to that which is grammatically clear. So, in my title phrase, “compassionate” can modify the way I’m consenting (“I’m consenting in a manner that is compassionate to myself and others”). Or it can refer to the context of compassion – from self, others and the Source of all Love – that enables my willingness and ability to consent and in which the consent remains immersed (“My experience of compassion is enabling my consent”). Or it can refer to the compassion embedded within the reality to which I’m consenting (“I’m consenting to a compassionate reality”).

I want it all and mean it all – but the grammar is beyond me.

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[This is part of a series of posts exploring a contemplative pathway to healing/maturing that I call “a compassionate consent to reality.” For an introduction to the project, you may want to see this post here.]

1. “The Law of Love is the deepest law of our nature, not something alien or extraneous to our nature. Our nature itself inclines us toward love, and to love freely.” - Thomas Merton (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)