As Melissa Smith stated beautifully in her chalice lighting, compassion is inseparable from suffering. Compassion is often thought of as a choice or insight to suffer with another person who is also suffering. There are endless opportunities for compassion, because suffering is endless. This may seem at first glance to be a discouraging statement, but it’s not. It doesn’t have to be. Suffering is the ground of compassion, it is the raw material of which our life is made, and it is the raw material from which all our beauty and meaning comes from. But there is a difference between suffering and compassion, and it is important we understand this difference. Suffering is the chronic sense of things not being how we want them to be. On a personal level few of us revel in the prospect of getting older, experiencing sickness, and approaching our death. We don’t want this. Or on a national level, suffering is not wanting police to murder our people, our American people who are black and brown, and black people all over the world. We don’t want this, of course.
We don’t want a corrupt government; we don’t want to have our tax dollars support further environmental destruction and economic exploitation of the working class. Not everyone wants this. And that number is growing. We don’t want to live in a sham democracy, and we don’t want to live a sham life, with blinders on, blind to the problems of the world. Many people don’t want this. We also don’t want to feel distressed every waking moment, unable to enjoy life or feel a sense of contentment. Most of us don’t want this either. All of this not wanting things to be the way they are is suffering. It is not necessarily the same as compassion.
We can spend a lot of time simply not wanting things to be the way they are. We can easily spend an entire lifetime just not wanting things to be the way they are. It is too easy to become so inundated with dissatisfaction, so overwhelmed by the seeming abundance of violence and cruelty, that any serious thinking person would have difficulty getting out of bed and greeting a new day. For many years, I’ve spent good energy and time looking at the world, and not wanting things to be the way they are.
For years, the level of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with people and institutions seemed to have no bottom. For years, when I looked at the world, I saw a gloomy, chaotic, violent, repressed, and unjust world. I wasn’t wrong. There are many good reasons, and many pieces of evidence to support this view. I don’t need to give you that evidence, because now we are so inundated with it. It took me years to understand that this view was not compassion. It was only suffering. A good starting point, but not the complete picture.
We are given the opportunity today for a compassionate moment, if we develop the vision and practice for it. Compassion is more than suffering. Compassion is to understand that suffering itself can in its own time and in its own way, and in our unique situation, connect us to the suffering of the world. And if we see it through, without stopping, with enough communal support and courage, that suffering is no longer just suffering.
Connected intimately to the suffering of our neighbors, connected to a suffering city and suffering world, experienced in its fullness beyond our sense of judgement, is something more than suffering. This desire to connect deeply to our own suffering and a suffering world is the desire for love. To feel and be felt by another, even if this great feeling is on our own, in our own house. Instead of suffering diminishing our life, it then expands it – this is the transformation we speak of in our church mission statement. Transformation is discovering that the pain and suffering of life instead of defeating us, can expand us with the right kind of community, intention, and practice.
Many of you have probably heard the term compassion fatigue. This is real. It’s the sense that feeling the suffering of the world wears you down to the point of literally fatiguing you. Maybe some of you can relate to this. I’ve had many conversations with those who work in helping professions: ministers, social workers, therapists who have experienced compassion fatigue.
They all shared with me a common experience that I try to take to heart: all of them felt solely responsible for the suffering they encountered, and felt it was up to them to fix or ameliorate the situation. A natural backlash from this predicament I also commonly witness, when a person seeks to unconcern themselves with the state of the world or the true state of their lives, so as to avoid the prospect of fatigue. Both of these positions seem to inevitably lead to trouble unless there is an adjustment: feeling completely responsible or feeling little or no responsibility.
The kind of compassion I seek to practice is found in the middle between these two extreme positions. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. This has been a good mantra for me. I can’t do everything – I have my limits in every sense: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I can’t fix the world. This may seem obvious, but it’s a good reminder. But I’m also responsible for it – not completely responsible, but responsible. I owe the world my part.
Finding that part, finding that role for each of us, is part of the mission of this church. In discovering our role in healing the world, suffering is no longer just suffering. It becomes something else.
As I’ve said, for years, I just felt constantly inundated and overwhelmed. I still have days like that – I’m really not that different from many of you. Especially after the brutal death of George Floyd, it took me about a week, before I could let myself cry about it. It’s sometimes taken me years, so a week is progress for me. But I now understand something that I did not know even a few years ago. There is something more than suffering. And this something more is not an escape or a denial of pain or trouble in ourselves or in our world. I’ve learned that given the right conditions of caring like we have in this community, given the right conditions of intention, and regular committed practice to doing what we can within our limitations, there is something more than suffering.
There is the possibility of connection, a connection that is transformative because it is healing, a gentle, consistent strength that exists even in horrific circumstances. I’ve only just recently learned this.
Compassion is just as real as suffering, maybe even more real. It is pervasive, if we can find the right conditions, the right intention, and consistent practice to do what we can where we are and how we are in the world. I have spoken to many people over the years about racism, and how there is a sense that it will never go away and be with us until the end of time. It is reasonable when one looks at suffering to just see endless suffering, going on forever. I don’t think this is inaccurate, it just misses something crucial, something that is more than suffering but it is just as present.
We are living in a compassionate moment. We are living in a moment so full of suffering of every imaginable kind, and this suffering is reaching such a heightened pitch, that it is now becoming something else. It is becoming a kind of transformative power that allows for greater integrity, greater honesty, and thus greater understanding. Greater integrity, greater honesty, and greater understanding – that is love.
It is one of my favorite things about this church. We don’t put love up on a pedestal, like something otherworldly or beyond us. It is not a deity. Love is an active force in each of our lives at this moment. Love is not the absence of suffering, it is the tending carefully to suffering, until it becomes more than itself, or more accurately becomes its true self. It is a certain perspective that a community like this cultivates over time that sees the suffering of the world not as a failure, but an opportunity, an opportunity to grow more loving, an opportunity to discover newfound depths of compassion.
I think I was right for years to think that there is no end to suffering, no bottom and no limit.
It took me years to discover that if this is true, it also means there is also no end to the way compassion can manifest, no bottom or limit to love. They are the same truth, with a pivot of perspective and experience that is gathered over time in a community like this with regular intention and practice.
Many people who don’t know much about our history falsely characterize us as a community without any kind of faith. They may think that faith is a weakness or misunderstand faith as a belief that is completely separate and has nothing to do with our actual lived experience. Another word that I like is trust. Trust is a beautiful word, and I think accurately points to the kind of faith, if you wish to call it that, that our community cultivates. It does take trust that is proven by experience over time that a moment of great suffering, pain, and grief, has the potential to transform our lives for the better. That is a deep trust. It is not a guarantee this will always be so, but there is a trust that this is possible, that the potential is there given the right conditions, the right place, the right time.
I trust this, which is why I am heartened and grateful to be alive during this moment of potential transformation for our people, especially those who are most vulnerable systematically. I think of the moments that have brought us here. I think of the National Guard being called to send planes to bomb black owned businesses in Tulsa in 1921, the massacre of a thriving middle-class Black community. I think of black men being asked to surrender on their lawns, and then shot in front of their families, all their possessions burned. I think of Oxford, Mississippi, and the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, and the rioting this caused among whites who burned cars and killed black citizens in their area with seeming immunity. I think of the latest police murder in Atlanta just a couple days ago of Rayshard Brooks, and the growing unrest and response of our communities across the world to root out racism in its many forms. It is a moment of real possibility. It is a moment that I believe will cast a long shadow on the arc of history, and perhaps be the ray of light that shows its bend toward justice.
It is a painful, dreadful, grief filled moment. It is a moment full of systemic corruption and perversion that seems to have no bottom, no limit. It is a moment of great precariousness. It is a moment that will sometimes keep us up at night, asking with fervent passion questions perhaps we never had the awareness to ask before. It is a moment of real compassion. It is a moment where the veil is lifted and we see with stark clarity what was there all along, and what emerges is something that has the potential to transform us, if we allow for the right conditions, the right intention, and the right practice. It has the power to wake us up, and make us more of who we actually are, instead of who we think we are. It has the potential to expand our life, and in that expansion, expand our society and our body politic.
My only parting advice for myself and for all of us is something I repeat at the beginning of every worship service: let’s not waste this. Let’s not waste this moment. If it is true that there possibly is no end to suffering, no bottom or no limit, let us awaken as a community to the flip side of this truth: this means there is no end to compassion, no bottom or limit that can be placed on our love. That is what we are practicing together as a community, and through that practice and intention, this moment can be seen more clearly for what it is. Painful, yes, Destabilizing, sure. Unconscionable and violent, absolutely. But also, something more – something more that is waiting for our discovery.
