Yesterday I attended an all-day meditation retreat titled “With compassion, we turn the tide.” I can’t convey how it felt then and how it feels now, but I’m reverberating with the offering, the generosity and dedication of this group of nuns, and what each of us might bring to our lives and the lives around us. Here’s a documentary video to give a sense of the dedication a group of people choose in bringing generosity and compassion to their lives and the lives of others.
Expansion
Today I notice so clearly what the early morning darkness does to my need to go within, to look around my home with new eyes. Yesterday our rugs were cleaned and a tree branch that fell in the storm cut into pieces and removed. Both allow me to see a little more clearly as the rugs, still drying, leave the space open and spacious. What do I put back? And more light comes through the space opened by the removal of branch and leaves. How now do I arrange my life in these next weeks of increasing darkness before the return to more light?
In that exploration, I read about the controversy over Toni Morrison’s book Beloved. I think back to reading Moby Dick in high school and Heart of Darkness. Did I understand the depths of what was being said? Probably not but surely I was affected and moved into the study of literature in college. I wanted to understand and experience more than what was tangible and directly evident in my life.
What is it to be threatened by what comes from “outside”? When my son was a freshman in high school, the first Gulf War began. His school and those he knew were against it but on-line he connected with people who were going there. He learned other viewpoints. I’m grateful for that.
I will re-read Beloved to sink into why it’s such a threat to some that it threatens a very important election in VA. When I wrote postcards urging Democrats to vote in this election, I didn’t realize how much was at stake. I can have compassion for those who so fear anything that might threaten what they’ve been taught to believe, and I can hope the ability to understand our relationships, responsibility, and perceptions expands with a Democratic win.
Compassion
A friend sent me this story a few days ago and today I open it. It’s “In the Belly of the Whale” by Patricia Hampl, perfect for this day.
I offer a few lessons from it to entice you in though they may seem stark without the story which is the point of stories. We’re struck inside, touched and entertained as we’re changed.
The lesson begins to come home: at the heart of the refusal of mercy is not cruelty – but fear.
Cruelty belongs, then, to fear, and compassion belongs to justice. It is necessary to learn these relationships, to trace the integuments that bind us to our actions.
But that’s the point: compassion is not a personal form of enlightened social welfare for everybody else. It is reality, it is how things fit together in the universe. To lack compassion is not merely to lack a human quality – it is to not quite exist, to be missing an essential working part of reality.
Compassion is the acknowledgment of connection, the refusal to see the world as divided into distinct units which can do without each other. It is, literally, a “suffering together with” (com/with + pati/suffer). It is primal union.
And so Dr. King taught, and so today, we remember and stretch to embody his teachings even more as they expand with his death. You can read the story here, as you salivate to digest.
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