by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given January 20, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Here we have come in from the wind and the rain,

and gathered together as one strong body,

to lift our voices in song,

to be reminded that we are not alone,

to be challenged and to be renewed.

to be inspired to bring our voices into the world.

Come, now, and let us worship here together.

Most of us, I think, strive to be compassionate people. That has certainly been my experience in life. We see needs in the world and we want to do something to address those needs. But I also have to confess that when I hear the word compassion, one of the first things I feel is guilt. No matter how much I might be doing, there’s that little voice inside of my head that says I should be doing more.

I expect that I’m not alone in that feeling. No matter what we might find ourselves doing, there is also the sense that we are not doing enough. After all, we just have to look around us to see all kinds of poverty and pain. We don’t have to look far when we are walking around our church block or our neighborhood, or when we are reading the newspaper or watching the television. And it doesn’t take much to have the feeling that if we open ourselves up too much, we will quickly be overwhelmed.

And so we figure out, over time, what we can and can’t do. We learn limits and distance ourselves from the pain we see. We give at the office. We give at the church. We donate as much as we can. We learn to put up walls. We work out something we can live with.

Of course sometimes we find those limits we make challenged. More than one parent has talked with their child about the importance of helping people who are homeless. How you can donate food, how you can donate clothes and help in all kinds of ways, only to have the child ask why the homeless person can’t stay in their house because they have plenty of room.

Seeing the world through the eyes of a child is sometimes a delight and sometimes poses a big challenge. In this we might start to see our struggle. The constructs we have created for ourselves in order to live in the world don’t always hold up.

It is natural to set the limits of what we can and can’t do in response to what is around us, but what happens is that we distance ourselves from not only the problems, but the people affected by those problems. If we don’t see the people, then maybe we won’t see the problem. We can quickly come to see them as the other, and we are not connected. It is how we learn to cope.

Several years ago, I was serving breakfast at a homeless shelter in San Francisco. It was the first time I had done such a thing and I was kind of nervous. I remember the image of those of us from the church behind the table and those who had slept at the church and who were getting breakfast were on the other side. I remember what seemed to be all kinds of rules; I expect to make sure everything remained orderly.

We started to serve breakfast and the men were coming through, and then all of a sudden, I saw a man in line who looked exactly like my college roommate, Ralph. Same narrow face, about the same receding hairline, same glasses, same serious look. The resemblance was so striking that I really thought it might be Ralph. I suddenly felt kind of sick to my stomach.

Now I knew that this was San Francisco and that Ralph lived in Minnesota. I knew that he would not be here and he would not be homeless. And yet in that moment the man in front of me was no longer a stranger. He was someone I loved and cared about. And in that moment I was also aware of my own fears about being alone in a strange city with nowhere to go. Could I be homeless? Suddenly I was aware of the fears that I was carrying into that place.

And there was the rub. Compassion is usually something I think of myself as doing for another. It comes with the assumption that I’m the one who has something to give and someone else will be on the receiving end, and I may not imagine the relationship much further than that. I don’t have needs, thank you. That keeps things neat and orderly and it keeps me in control.

We don’t want to go too far outside of our comfort zones. If we open ourselves up too much, we make ourselves vulnerable. We risk being rejected, we risk letting our fears show through. And if we open ourselves up too much to the suffering of the world, it may be that we have to also look inside at our own suffering. Where am I  lonely? Where am I hurting? Will there always be someone there for me?

That may not be something we want to do. But of course, that is what true compassion is all about. It is an awareness that there is suffering in the world and we are part of that suffering. And it is that suffering that makes us human, that makes us connected with all living things. It means that we are not alone but are very much with others.

Compassion has its roots in Latin words meaning, most simply, to suffer with, to undergo with, to share solidarity with. Compassion is not pity, it is not doing unto others. “It comes from an awareness of a shared weakness, and not from someone else’s weakness,” as theologian Matthew Fox says. It is an awareness of our mutuality, that when we reach out to another, we reach out to ourselves. And when we put down another, we put down ourselves.

Fox says an easy way to distinguish compassion from pity is to ask ourselves whether we would celebrate with the same people we might pity? If we do, then it holds up that we are interconnected through it all, and not just when one party needs help from another.

Sentimental pity is not compassion at all. It can manifest actually as a kind of self-indulgence. We can use it to further isolate us from others. In seeing some else’s pain we can feel ourselves superior. They need help from us.

Compassion calls us to be active, to respond. It means we are willing to take risks and to stumble at times. It means that we are able to forgive others and ourselves when we do not live up to our expectations. Not one of us is perfect and compassion is something we are always striving for, I think. There may be a limit to what we can wrestle with or handle. But if we are able to be in the world in such as way that we are open, we might find what it is we need to find. It starts with being open and honest.

Writer Angeles Arrien tells the story of being at a bus stop, sitting next to a woman reading a newspaper. There on the sidewalk in front of them was a 14-year old on a skateboard. He had his baseball cap turned around with the bill in the back. He was skating beautifully and he was skating fast. He buzzed by them once, then again. When he came by the third time, he accidentally knocked the woman’s newspaper out of her hands. The woman was startled and yelled out, “Oh, why don’t you grow up!”

The teenager rolled down to the corner of the block, where he stood talking to a buddy. The two of them kept looking back at the woman. She hesitated for a moment, then rolled up her newspaper, tucked it under her arm, and walked over and motioned to him, “Won’t you come here? I want to talk with you.”

Very reluctantly, he skated over to her, turned his cap around with the bill in front, and said, “Yeah?”

She said, “What I meant to say was that I was afraid that I might get hurt. I apologize for what I did say.”

The boy’s face lit up, and he said, “How cool!”

I like that story because the woman was real and honest, and so was the kid. How often do we not say something because we are afraid. How often do we keep ourselves back? How often do we tell someone else what we wish we had said?

There is not a way that we instantly become more generous or more loving or more compassionate. It is all a path. It comes with the courage to see ourselves and where we are in the world, with all of our vulnerabilities, with all of our resources, with all of our gifts. It comes with the courage to see when we are afraid, and to face that fear and not let it get the best of us. It comes with the courage to let go of our egos and the things we hold onto that keep us separate from others.

An important dimension of compassion is that it include ourselves. For some of us, too often it is easier to be generous to others and not to be so to ourselves. In my life I know that when I don’t want to see the pain in another person, it is really my own pain that I don’t want to recognize. But in knowing that we are connected, seeing how we are both part of something universal, it puts our own pain—and our own joys—in a different context. I see that I am not so much alone as part of some great mix. If we can be open to ourselves and to others, our natural instincts will be able to flow.

Compassion is known through our acts, but more than that, it is how we live our lives. It is the perspective we bring to how we are with others in the world. It is an openness to the fullness of life. It is something we circle around. It is something we strive for, something we try to achieve, but none of us is able to achieve some kind of perfection. Most of us never do all we can or want to do. None of us are able to take on the woes of the world. And we don’t need to do that. All we need to do is to try to see what we are called to do and to see how we are part of the whole of what is happening. We need to forgive ourselves and others when we don’t live up to expectations. We begin again in love. 

It has been said that the law of the scripture comes down to love you neighbor as yourself. That in that law there is all that we need to know. If we are really able to look into the eyes of another, and see in them ourselves, and all living things, then the rest will follow from there.

Genuine compassion has been called the highest form of spirituality. In living in a way of compassion, we see the  connection of self, to other, to the ground of our being—what some call god. We see the union and there is no separation. It is not that we live in such a way that we don’t mess up. We mess up all the time. We miss the mark all the time. We don’t do all we want to do. And we know that we come back to center and we see that we are flawed but also see all that we are capable of, and that we begin again in love. Compassion flows not out of guilt, but out of a fullness of life.

Theologian Frederick Buechner says: “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like 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.”

Writer Barbara Brodsky tells the story of her work in the Civil Rights movement and about one important teacher.

“In the sixties I spent a lot of time working with human rights. In the early years, I was sometimes more motivated by fear and saw some of the painful results of that ego at work. I remember a sit-in at a small Southern lunch counter. We were two Northern students, one white and one black, so young and so self-righteous. We had no idea what those in the town were thinking and feeling, and we did not want to know. We only wanted to express our viewpoint and righteousness. We wanted to change them.

“We came into the lunchroom and sat at the counter, facing the glares of those sitting around us. The cook just looked at us and asked what we wanted. “Coke, milkshake, doughnut” came our replies. We were feeling smug; was it really this easy? He gathered some items and carried them to the counter. I remember how he approached me with my doughnut and the large glass of Coke, sweat-covered from its icy contents. I looked at the glass with pleasure since the day was hot. He reached out with the glass, and with no hesitation poured it over my head. While I sat there in shock, he crumbled the doughnut over me too. The second counterman did the same to my partner. Then he nodded, and others at the counter simply picked us up, two young women, carried us out the door, dumped us on the curb, and locked the door behind us.

“In those early days, I totally lacked compassion for this opposition. They were wrong and I was right; it was that simple I had no ability to be present with their pain nor to hear them. I had no ability to be present with my own fear nor hear myself.

“Years passed and I did learn. I remember a few hours in a small jail. One of my cell partners was an older, Southern black woman, large of body and with soft, deep eyes. She wore a black dress covered with red roses and a tiny hat still adorned her head. I was angry at what had happened that particular day, an incident not too different from the one above. I was expressing that anger, muttering, pacing the cell. After about an hour she walked up to me so sweetly and in a kind voice incited me to sit down. ‘Aren’t you angry, too?’ I asked her. ‘Yes,’ she replied ‘(I’m angry,) but I also love them, sweetheart, and they are so afraid.’ She hugged me gently as I wept. She taught me with those simple words that anger and compassion were not mutually exclusive. It was the first time my eyes really opened to what was happening around me, and from this sister whose name I never even knew, I began to learn the power of love.”

That story gets to the power of what Martin Luther King tried to do in his lifetime. His work was not only to create a society were African Americans could have the same opportunities as everyone else, but to create a society that was better for everyone. In his message of non-violence, because of the compassion present in his work, what he was trying to do was a radical thing.

It is important to hold his work in this broader perspective. If he was trying to make it better not just for his people but for all people, it is no wonder that the work can be seen as not having made the progress that we hoped it might. It speaks of the enormity of the challenge. It also calls each one of us to commit ourselves again to that vision.

If we ask ourselves how we are doing in our world today, the answer may not be easy. It is not easy to live in such an awareness of how we are interrelated and what that asks of us. What would it mean to treat everyone, even people we call terrorists, humanely in the places where they are held. What would it mean to put the resources we are investing in war into actions of peace. What would it mean for our foreign policy to strive to treat others as we would have them treat us?

Words of poet Adrienne Rich:

We are a small and lonely human race

Showing no sign of mastering solitude

Out on this stony planet that we farm.

The most that we can do for one another

Is let our blunders and our blind mischances

Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.

We might as well be truthful. I shouldn’t say

They’re luckiest who know they’re not unique;

But only art or common interchange

Can teach that kindest truth. And even art

Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville

Or calmed a Mahler’s frenzy; you and I

Still look from separate windows every morning

Upon the same white daylight in the square.

The spiritual life at its core is a quest to know how we fit into the scheme of things. How we are connected to others, how we live in the mystery, how we are together on this stony planet where we farm. And in moments of this life we get glimpses of how we all look out at the same sky, how we all breath the same air, how we are challenged by a question posed by a child.

And we are moved to follow the impulse that is inside of us, the impulse to reach out, to offer and hand, to make love manifest in the world, to make justice manifest in the world. And in the same moment that we reach out, we see how the hand also reaches out to us, and that we are part of something much larger, something we will never fully know. But in that moment, we get a glimpse of how we would like it to be all of the time.

PRAYER

Great spirit, open our hearts to love, open our hearts that we might see the world in all of its terror and wonder, that we might be agents of justice in the world. Help us to be kind to others and to ourselves. When we falter, help us to forgive. Help us to know that we are not alone, but embraced by a love that moves through us and among us. Amen.

Live in the spirit, good people. Let love guide you and keep you. Go this day in hope. Amen.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.