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From a 'trembling womb': the call to compassion
by Dan Madden
Can you define compassion in less than 25 words?
How about this? “The deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another, together with the inclination to give aid or support or to show mercy.”
Ok, I confess, I cheated. That’s from the tattered American Heritage Dictionary on my desk. Did you know that compassion comes from the Latin roots cum (“with”) and patior (“to suffer”)?
With all due respect to the people at American Heritage, their 22-word definition is unsatisfying. Kind of like eating only one potato chip.
The prophet Muhammad said those who display piety “but have not committed their whole lives to compassionate action” are like those who pray out of habit, “without true awe, humility and longing . . . their religion remains mere pretence.”
Great thinkers have called compassion the “basis of morality,” “the beginning of ethical development,” and even the “essential character of the really great novelist.”
“A religious man,” Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.”
Hasidic Jews go so far as to say, “He who feels no compassion will become insane.”
His Holiness the Dali Lama instructs, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
And following perhaps the greatest moment of his papacy, John Paul II, emerged from the cell of the man who had attempted to assassinate him and said, “I spoke to him as a brother…”
***
It is out of compassion that Jesus invited the tax collector to join him, healed the lepers, raised Lazarus, and rescued the condemned adulteress with a simple suggestion to her accusers.
It could be argued that if you had to edit the entire moral teachings of Jesus into one word, compassion would be it.
As the Church prepares for Easter, the celebration of God’s greatest act of compassion, I asked four friends, all alumni of Conception Seminary College to share their thoughts about this weighty word.
They are Father Bob Murphy, pastor of Our Lady of Coronation parish in Grandview, Mo., Father Roger Schmit, chaplain at Providence Hospital in Kansas City, Kan., Father Rick Dierkes, my pastor at the Co-Cathedral in St. Joseph, Mo., and Father Tom Greisen, a former director of spiritual formation for Conception Seminary College who currently directs the lay ministry office for the Archdiocese of Omaha.
In four enlightening and stimulating conversations a theme emerged, namely, that if compassion, the radical compassion of Jesus Christ, guides your decisions and your relationships you will suffer for it, your courage will be tested, and you will be a pretty good Christian. More specifically, you will be Christ-like.
Sadly, despite his best efforts, compassion is often one of the first of Jesus’ teachings that his followers discard or forget. Strong opinions and inflexible certainty about right, wrong, and that ecumenical monkey wrench, truth, often lead us to judge and exclude others who don’t share our morality or theology. Fear turns us into isolationists cordoned off by an “us against them” worldview.
Today, debates over the sanctity of human life, the war in Iraq, gay rights, and politics stir up more tempers than solutions. Sometimes we put more of a premium on being right than on actually working together to solve problems. Our evangelization at times is heavier on morality, rules and membership than on love, forgiveness and compassion.
Watch an episode of Hardball on CNN, or read the letters to the editor section of your local paper, and it’s quite clear what we are against. But do we know what we are for?
A word of warning. If you choose to continue reading, you may feel chastened by what our four alumni have to say. I certainly did. You may feel challenged, inspired, and perhaps even angry. Please don’t cancel your subscription to Tower Topics. Remember, there was a rebel from Nazareth who had the same affect on people.
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“The trembling womb,” Father Tom Greisen said, smiling like a child revealing a secret.
That is how the ancient Hebrews saw compassion.
“The Hebrew mind didn’t think in the abstract,” he said. “They thought in images and metaphors. At one level, compassion is this deep visceral experience, one of being moved to the depths. But it is also at the place where life is created. Compassion, by its nature is the re-creation of life, the bestowing of grace.
“The great mystics, people like John of the Cross and Mother Teresa, didn’t see people as foreigners or different, he said. “They saw them genuinely as brothers and sisters from the same womb of God.”
 In his Spiritual Exercises St. Ignatius of Loyola teaches that the first grace one must receive is acceptance of God’s unconditional love. “Once you experience the profundity of God’s love you will begin facing sin – in your own life and in the world,” Father Tom explained. “When you know that you are loved unconditionally by God, and at the same time you realize that you are a sinner, I think that equals being compassionate.”
Father Tom shared a parable from the desert fathers about an old and wise abbot who is asked by a group of young monks to come to their community and pass judgment on one of their confreres.
“He doesn’t want to go, but eventually he concedes,” Father Tom said. “But first he takes a burlap sack with holes in it. He fills it with sand, throws it over his shoulder and begins walking.”
 Upon his arrival, the young monks welcome him as a holy and wise elder, but they ask him about the sack that is leaking sand all over the floor of their monastery.
“You ask me to pass judgment on one of my brothers,” he replied, “while my sins are pouring out behind me.”
“He knew he was a sinner, so he didn’t come as one powerful to pass judgment and condemnation,” Father Tom said. “He came as a fellow sinner. When the community heard this, they no longer held a grudge against their fellow monk.”
***
Mark Twain said, “Man is the only animal that blushes . . . or needs to.”
Man also is the only animal capable of reason. But if we rely too heavily on it we may end up blushing.
“We have this problem of going to our logical, thinking side,” Father Rick Dierkes said. “Compassion has to do with emotions, what we call heart stuff. Reason and logic are head stuff.” Logic is handy when it comes to fixing problems, but it can interfere with compassion.
“If I have compassion, I have to understand what the other person is feeling from their vantage point, from their heart,” Father Rick said. “Sometimes, because of our compassion, we also want to heal, and all of a sudden we move out of compassion into logic and reason.”
From there, if we’re not careful, he warns, the heart can easily turn cold. “I know that for many people there is a time when they say, it’s time to move on. But there is a difference between having compassion and trying to figure out what to do with it. Sometimes you can move on too soon.”
Part of compassion is accepting that we don’t have all the answers.
 “I can’t let the fact that I can’t do anything about fixing the problem get in the way of compassion,” he said. “So often we are afraid that we can’t do anything about it, and then we don’t enter in at all. My responsibility is simply to care and listen. I don’t know where it’s going to go after that.”
Father Bob recalled when he was a young priest assigned to a predominantly black parish in a poor area of Kansas City. “We used to get college kids from the East Coast who would come for the summer to work in the inner city,” he said. “The only ones who had good experiences, the ones who stuck it out, were the ones with compassion. They were able to let go of their own prejudices and feelings and they really tried to read the people and meet them head on. They saw individuals instead of classifying the drug addict, the prostitute, the angry racist, the single mother.”
It’s the same with people who become involved in helping the poor, he said. “People go in thinking that the poor are going to be grateful, but the poor may lie to you, they may cheat you, they may try to double dip at the food pantry, they may be totally unpleasant. Your focus has to be on compassion, on trying to understand them, or after a while you’ll say, the heck with it.”
***
Father Roger Schmit contends that practically every social ill in our world exists because the parties involved refuse to be compassionate.
“In order to be compassionate, you have to be humble,” he said. “In order to be compassionate you have to give up arrogance. In order to be compassionate you have to hold out the possibility that you are wrong.”
People these days aren’t very good at that.
  “It’s like the kiss of death in our country, to say, ‘I was wrong,’” Father Roger said. “There’s an egocentric attitude, especially among leaders. They think, ‘What are people going to think of me if I have to admit I’m wrong?’”
Father Roger, whose diplomacy is patterned after a first-century rabble-rouser who trashed a temple, isn’t afraid to pick a prickly example.
In its handling of the War in Iraq the Bush administration has shown contempt for compassion, he said. “I think if our government leaders were concerned about compassion they would have sat down with our Islamic brothers and sisters and asked them about their pain and fear, and about why they hate us the way they do. They would have found that some of their reasons are legitimate.”
Likewise, he noted that compassion was trampled in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church. Anger, mistrust and legal warfare left gaping wounds of alienation, resentment and suspicion.
In the words of columnist Father Ron Rolheiser, “victims are angry with perpetrators, priests are angry with their bishops, bishops are angry with the press, Catholics are angry at the Church, and a large body of churchgoers isn’t sure who to be angry with.”
The result, Father Roger said, was a missed opportunity for reconciliation.
***
Can anger and compassion co-exist?
“Certainly,” said Father Tom. “We should be angry about injustices and we should fight against them.”
Sometimes the womb trembles from conflict.
“There is such a thing as holy anger,” he said. “It’s not vengeful, though. It is of a different spirit when it comes out of compassion. In the Bible, judgment is always simultaneously the raising up of the lowly and the bringing down of the mighty.”
Judging and compassion are not mutually exclusive, Father Bob said.
“People these days often say, I can’t judge,” he said. “You can judge and you should.” He decries what he calls an increasingly laissez-faire view of morality that leads people to say things like, “I’m not really in favor of abortion, but whatever you do, that’s your deal.”
“We are called to make judgments about actions,” he asserted. “Actions are very objective. What we have to avoid is condemning the other person.”
Father Bob recalled a serial adulterer who once told him, “You have no right to judge me!”
“I can judge your actions,” the priest responded. “You are doing damage to your wife and children. That’s objective. I can’t fathom to understand what is going on deep within your soul that brought you to this point, but your actions are objectively sinful.”
Father Rick stressed that it’s “important to realize that caring and compassion are not the same as accepting the person’s reasons … You don’t have to jump in the pit with them.”
Fear of permissiveness is a major obstacle to compassion, Father Roger added. “For some reason, people think that sitting down and being nice to an adversary is considered permissive. They think one should never be kind to someone who has committed some wrong. We’re so determined to find out who’s wrong, condemn them, and then get on with our lives.”
Father Bob said many people confuse compassion with weakness. “Somehow it’s considered an unmanly thing; you’re letting your guard down,” he said. “In some ways they are right. That’s what compassion is about, letting go of your own needs.”
I asked if him if some people are too lazy or too busy to be compassionate, especially with people they disagree with.
“To be compassionate toward someone with a diametrically opposed view means some work, and frankly, a lot of people aren’t willing to put in the work,” he answered. “It’s much easier to vilify the other person and their stand than it is to try and understand them. It’s easier to draw the world in black and white. It doesn’t take as much time. It’s easier to say, ‘I’m sure of my moral stand, there’s no equivocation, and I’m sure they are wrong, so why do I need to get to know them any better.”
The tricky part for Christians is that it probably would’ve been easier for Jesus to let that crowd of men stone the adulteress. After all it was the law. He could have avoided a lot of heartache if he’d quietly averted his eyes and walked by the blind man instead of stopping to heal him.
And it certainly would’ve been easier to skip the crucifixion.
***
I have a mission statement of sorts. After Father Bob’s earlier remarks, it looks like I’ll need to edit it so it’s not so laissez-faire, but it goes like this: “I have a hard enough time keeping Dan Madden in line; I don’t have time to be worrying about how other people live their lives.” I usually say it jokingly, but occasionally I stop and remind myself that I really do have a hard time keeping Dan Madden in line. On some superficial level, I hope that qualifies as “being reflective.” I just wanted to get that on the record before the next paragraph.
***
“To me, the greatest sin in our society is the failure to be reflective,” Father Bob said. “I think that is at the root of a lot of the anger in our world. When I have people in for counseling, especially men, that is a major problem. They don’t reflect on their attitudes, actions and words. In reflection you come to own the things you do well, and hopefully you learn to own those things that are wrong, and that can lead to correction. It’s impossible to be compassionate if you are not reflective.”
 According to Father Tom, reflection is what makes saints holy.
“When there is something vicious or ugly the great people, the holy ones, recognize it immediately, because they’ve seen it in themselves,” he said. “The ones you have to worry about are the people who say they know they would never do that. They don’t have any connection with the darkness inside them, so there is no way they can reach out to that which is dark or broken in someone else.”
All four priests agreed that without reflection, there is no reconciliation. And without reconciliation, the best of intentions, whether by an individual or an institution, will become corrupted and devoid of compassion.
Father Tom recalled a documentary he saw soon after the 9-11 terror attacks.
An old Catholic priest who was interviewed said that when he saw the second airplane crash into the World Trade Center, he knew instantly who was responsible.
“I knew it was my old friend,” the priest said. “I knew it was my old friend, because only my old friend could do something so dark and so mean and so evil.”
His old friend was religion.
***
I have a final story of my own. A few years back, when I was editor of the archdiocesan newspaper in Seattle, I decided that to mark the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I would interview all of the prominent anti-abortion activists who had been at it from the beginning.
After about my fifth interview, I’d had my fill of anti-abortion activists. They were so angry. Their talk was full of war metaphors and contempt.
I found myself wondering, what do these people do for relaxation?
My final interview was with Ken VanDerhoeff, a tall, slender attorney who at the time was president of Washington Right to Life. Impeccably  dressed in a suit and tie, he welcomed me with a warm smile and a firm handshake. Ken, who looked to be in his mid 40s but was probably in his early 50s, had been a young lawyer on the legal team that argued against Roe v. Wade. As our conversation progressed, I was lulled by the soft timbre of his voice. Then it dawned on me. Ken wasn’t angry! There was no sarcasm, no spite, no combat metaphors.
I asked how he did it, how he stayed so calm and peaceful when many of his fellow activists were sputtering like General Patton (pardon the metaphor).
He wasn’t surprised by my question.
“I was angry once,” he admitted. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, he had taken his anger for a brisk walk and ended up on his knees inside a Franciscan church, asking God why he had let such a terrible thing happen. It was there that he found the sense of peace that has enabled him to fight the good fight for almost a quarter of a century without developing ulcers.
“I get up each morning and ask God for the strength to do his work to the best of my ability,” he said. “Each evening, I ask myself if I did the best I could. And then I thank God for his grace in my life.
“Roe v. Wade probably won’t be overturned in my time,” he said. “I don’t know if it ever will. All I can do is my part. It’s really up to God what will ultimately happen.
“The problem with our movement is that we lose sight of the big picture,” he said. “We forget that there is another side, and that, like us, they are mostly good people who believe they are doing the right thing. If we don’t have compassion for them, we will become bitter and angry and nothing will ever be accomplished.”
The article you are reading was conceived that day.
***
Being a U.S. Catholic is a wild ride. There are so many distractions from the secular world, so many issues to keep track of. There are many rules and so many temptations to break them. There is an astonishing diversity of race, personality and conviction. And from the loftiest prelate to the “once a year on Easter” Catholic there is way too much divisiveness, insensitivity and anger.
 Compassion is the moral compass that keeps me on course through turbulent waters. I stray often, usually toward the muddy left bank, but the words of my Catholic heroes remind me to stay where current runs clear and true. Three of my heroes, in particular, were men despised in their time. But they were also beloved. They were peacemakers, and they were revolutionaries. And when they died, their followers thought they had left work undone.
The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who championed the complex and challenging “Consistent Ethic of Life,” otherwise known as the Seamless Garment, argued that Catholic tradition “joins the humanity of the unborn infant and the humanity of the hungry. It calls for positive legal action to prevent the killing of the unborn or the aged and positive societal action to provide shelter for the homeless and education for the illiterate.” The potential of the moral and social vision of the Church, he said, “is appreciated in a new way when the systematic vision of Catholic ethics is seen as the background for the specific positions we take on a wide range of issues.”
John XXIII, the peasant pope who was supposed to be a mere steward to the throne until the real talent could take over, instead launched perhaps the greatest revolution in Church history when he “opened the windows and let in the fresh air of the Holy Spirit.” His Second Vatican Council was an astonishingly compassionate event that opened minds, built bridges, and of course, like the Seamless Garment to come later, ticked off a few people.
My final hero is perhaps the most influential person in recorded history. He called for love and forgiveness, yet more people have been killed in his name than for any other cause. He said many impressive things and stories of his miraculous works have survived two millennia. He was a philosopher, a teacher and a sage. But he touched me most with one spontaneous act.
He wept.
"It is utterly intolerable for Catholics to restrict
themselves to the position of mere observers."
Pope John XXIII
We welcome your comments:
communications@conception.edu
www.conceptionabbey.org
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