Compassion

Passion can move you forward.  Compassion will move you upward.  I glanced at someone’s wall post from my Facebook feed this morning.  The jest of it was a reaction to someone who had stupidly and indeed criminally hit a small child at a school bus stop and then kept on driving.  Specifically the post commented that this person should never get out of jail.  Really?  What if it was an accident and the person was too scared to stop?  Too scared to face the consequences?  Have you ever been there?  Have you ever tried to hide from the consequences of your actions because you knew that the pain of bearing them would be almost intolerable (it never is, but we often rationalize it so)?  I have.  When you begin to put the shoe on the other foot, your foot, compassion becomes a bit more natural doesn’t it?

Passion can move you forward.  Compassion will move you upward.

I have unfortunately witnessed too often the “christian” attitude of compassion extending only so far as one’s ranking of the severity of the sin.  If it passes a certain threshold of nastiness, compassion tends to be left by the wayside.  But in all honestly we must be thankful that the author and finisher of the faith didn’t take the same approach.  His compassion knew no such thresholds, now did it?

I have unfortunately witnessed too often the “christian” attitude of compassion extending only so far as one’s ranking of the severity of the sin.

Now we have the difficult situation of the Boston Marathon bomber.  A nineteen year-old, who by all accounts seems to be a pretty normal kid.  He really screwed up now didn’t he?  People got hurt.  Innocent people.  8-year old innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time…the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  So, can we find compassion in the face of a brutal act of terrorism against us, against ours?  Hard stuff, huh?

My post this morning began with two statements and I believe them to be true.  We say (I say) an awful lot about passion.  How it is the key to success.  Discover your passion!  Live with passion!  And so on.  Yea that stuff is all well and good.  It can actually work.  The more passionate we are the better results we usually achieve.  We can move forward on that vehicle.

But is that all this life is about?  Moving forward?  Achieving?  Making it big?  Living that life of our dreams?  We all want that.  I want that.  But is that really what it is all about?  I don’t think so….I hope not.

When I say compassion moves us upward I am not consciously speaking in religious terms.  But nevertheless “compassion” is intertwined with spirituality.  We exercise it not for any particular quid pro quo, but because it just feels like the right thing to do. It is associated with something I would tend to call “the greater good.”  Passion just doesn’t get us to that point, but Com-passion does.  Maybe that is why religion gives us the greatest example of it.

That should tend to raise its level of importance a bit, don’t you think?