Enter Into Compassion

There are two doors. The one on the left has the sign TWTWW. The one on the right says Compassion.

The left door stands for The Way The World Works.  If you enter that you will find it’s crowded with people arguing.  They are researchers who have done their homework. Their papers are annotated with long bibliographies to support their theories. They are passionately arguing about the reasons and the causes of the world’s problems. Each invested in their own particular view because they have so much proof to back up their argument. Yet they can’t get everyone to agree.

The right door marked Compassion is eerily quiet. There are 2 rows of beds, most of them filled with people who seem to be near death. As you walk quietly through this room you realize it is a sterilized palliative care ward with white sheets and walls, and no sign of nursing staff. 

You decide to walk through the aisle. You see a woman, thin and pale. She is someone you love and she doesn’t know you are there. You softly say hello and there is no response. You say her name and she turns to you and smiles. You ask her if she remembers you and her eyes close as if to return to sleep.  You tell her you are here to help. You list all the therapies available that might cure her of the disease she is dying from. 

You are beginning to feel a panic rise from your stomach as you wonder if there was anyone there to help her or whether they gave up too soon.  Then a nurse appears and reminds you that this is a hospice. You feel your voice rising to a higher pitch as you interrogate. The friend you love who is dying turns away from you at this point. You are losing her. So you pull up a chair and sit quietly by her bed. Listen to her breathe for awhile, then you begin to sing very quietly:

            May I be filled with loving kindness, may I be well.

            May I be peaceful and at ease, may I be whole.

Then your friend slowly turns toward you, opens her eyes, and manages a feint smile.

            May you be filled with loving kindness, may you be well.

            May you be peaceful and at ease, may you be whole.

Slowly she moves her arm over her body towards the side of the bed where you sit.  You take her hand very gently and you sing

            May we be filled with loving kindness, may we be well.

            May we be peaceful and at ease, may we be whole.

All the muscles in her face relax as she sinks into her last exhalation. You weep silently and eventually leave.

Your heart is heavy and full of sorrow but you feel at peace because you were able to be with her as she left your world. You don’t know why she turned away when you offered to help or why she turned toward you when you sat quietly beside her. You don’t know what advised you to do that but it was clear then that was the right thing to do. Was it your imagination when you felt something was guiding you.  Was it you singing or was it someone else? What made you visit at that time?

There are no answers to your questions. You have no knowledge other than an intuitive pull. All you know is that you were there and you felt honoured to be there.

There have been many times when I was afraid to feel compassion, to express sympathy. Somehow it felt more like an intrusion into another's pain, to satisfy myself that I did something rather than nothing. Would I, through my own ignorance say something that was really harmful or hurtful?

What is compassion anyway? 

My introduction came through child birth. The nervous system reflecting away from myself and into life within and then around me. The first time I held a newborn infant I saw the shape of  responsibility to feel compassion, to keep this creature safe so he will survive.  How would I know how to do that?

  

After this infant opened his eyes and smiled, the realization that I was not the centre of the universe was a whole body awakening. It was a new entry into life, an unaffected being who came through me, revealing a deeper meaning as I rocked him in my arms. His fragile body said forget all that you think you know.

The pregnant body invaded the self-centred ego and reverberated back to the world. I think this is an apt metaphor for all men and women regardless of whether they have children or not, who see their life as being a conduit to new life whether it is a legal document, a piece of art, or a new community.

Wherever our task becomes one of caring for the other, the other becomes part of us. We suspend the judgement and learn to look into another’s eyes and see there what we see rather than what we have been told to see.

All of these eyes have different stories that can merge into a single narrative.  But being available to “thou” is a grounding alternative to “I” as Martin Buber pointed out in his book where “you” become half of what “I” am.  It is a shared responsibility where I neither feel I am to blame if you are not happy, or triumphant if you are. 

The world is with me and not about me, I can be open to what you think and feel and hope for without being an accomplice. I can help you find what you need by getting out of your way, by asking you how I can help.

To simply be with you, to listen and to feel what I feel as I hear your narrative. 

The stories you tell are embedded with layers of suffering and hope. This is how I enter into compassion.  To be with you – your achievements, your moments of disappointment, your grief.

Compassion doesn’t demand style or expertise – it demands presence. Compassion doesn’t ask for advice. It doesn’t ask for a fix. It’s asks for a witness, a friend, a person who hears and sees.

When we enter into compassion we simply have to be there, to get beneath the labels and intellectual constructs. To look into the face of suffering, the eyes of pain, while there, forget the narrative circling our own lives. Forget the economic forecasts, the daily news, and all that we pride ourselves on knowing. Compassion allows us to let down all the flags, all the defenses. It allows us to look into another person’s face and see a unique and indescribable beauty. It allows us a break from that inner critic that keeps feeding back a report on how we are doing.

The folks in the TWTWW room are important. They musn’t stop their research, the annotated bibliographies, their argumentation. Their compassion is invested in a better future for all, but the palliative care ward, the small song, the reaching hand is needed to provide the strength and support to endure.

I close with the words of a young Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank in Day by Day, ed. Chaim Stern (Beacon Press) hiding in an annex from the Nazis.

I can feel the suffering of millions
and yet, if I look up into the heavens,
I think it will all come right,
and that this cruelty too will end,
and that peace and tranquility will return again.
In the meantime,
I must uphold my ideals,
for perhaps the time will come
when I shall be able to carry them out.

The Not Impossible Plan

December 13, 2015,  Don Gayton, a clean energy engineer gave a presentation to the Unitarian Fellowship of Nanaimo about his five-year journey studying and working on potential solutions to climate change and his strong belief that it is not an impossible task to retire fossil fuel use by mid century. 

It was so well received a workshop was given a couple of weeks later.

Zale Dalen was motivated then to create this Video to get Don's message out.  It is brief, easy to understand and inspiring.  Please watch and encourage your friends to view this.

Meet the Cop Who Cut the Murder Rate in Glasgow

Michael Enright of CBC talks to Karyn McCluskey

Karyn McCluskey brought in a program that reduced the murder rate in Glasgow from 71 in 2002 to 14 in 2015.

Her focus was on how to prevent crime by getting involved with families in crisis rather than wait until their youth fall into the habits of crime. The results have been astonishing and yet this has hardly been reported in mainstream media.

Why would that be? Who chooses media policy? Are publishers scared to publish stories about social issues that indicate we have policy options?

McCluskey and Enright focused on causes - the lack of male guidance in the lives of youth at risk, and grinding poverty.

Dysbiosis

Dysbiosis is a term for microbial imbalance, most commonly reported as a condition in the digestive tract, associated with illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease, says Wikipedia.

What if we extended this definition to include the system we call society? Is there an imbalance within our society which is causing a social disease.  Clearly there are many signs of our species being in trouble when we are affected by extreme weather conditions on this planet, in this post modern age known as the anthropocene.

More than just factory chimneys spewing pollution into the air, theories have been developed that affect human behaviour. Religious fundamentalism that twists the teachings of the original prophets into austere practices and hatred towards the other to deflect attention away from political abuse. Economic systems that funnel the wealth away from the majority towards a malfunctioning minority. Dystopian narratives and stories written by popular writers such as Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and many others, also dire warnings written by non-fiction writers such as Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein -- reveal that we need to address that larger organism called the world.

More than this, the tendency for most people who live and work together to avoid talking about politics, religion and money, because it is deemed 'bad manners', when in fact these are the most important influences in our society -- indicates a dissociative disorder.

Let's start with money. Lynn Parramore interviewed Orsola Costantini, Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, on her paper "The Cyclically Adjusted Budget: History and Exegesis of a Fateful Estimate" which exposes the history of how a budget approach manipulates public opinion to serve the interests of the powerful. We have heard of austerity measures which tells people to expect less in pay, services and social justice to serve an ideal that appears to have no benefit to them.

The mantra of right wing parties and politicians is to take care of the economy first without explaining how they will do that.  Experience tells us that services needed to keep our society well loses funding while the mainstream media sends stories of the danger that terrorism poses.  In this way we are lead away from the connections of cause and effect. As a society we cannot connect our work, our efforts, our plans are disconnected to the system that controls and influences us.  We are suffering from social dysbiosis which affects the health of our minds, bodies, communities and future.  But this is not new. We have suffered unconsciously from the abuses of power-over from the beginning of social history.