Compassion

Now here’s something I find hard to figure out. How does love actually work, in the ordinary course of life? Is it something that operates regardless of how you feel, or even act? Or does it require maintenance?

Take, for example, a very mundane situation. You have a friend who’s not really a friend but just someone who is in some way enmeshed in your life. The relationship, if you can call it that, seems to come from nowhere. You have no genuine ties to this person, no common story, or only a very thin one, no shared roots. There may or may not be familial ties but these do not bind you to the person, neither do they sustain you, or the person, in your efforts to be good to one another. You could give up on it, but you don’t. Neither of you does.

You think about duty, the demands of your religion. The terrible word ‘ought’ creeps in and starts to dominate the situation. Perhaps this is what keeps you going, but duty or some kind of filial obligation, perhaps, is not going to carry you through to the next moment of having to do something, or be someone, for this person. At the same time, you don’t want to give up on them. Something compels you to keep going with this act of kindness, whatever it consists of, to go on with the acceptance of this responsibility.

To be responsible for someone is to be answerable for them, rather than to them. This being the case, it helps to know to whom you are answerable and why. I think this is where your religion can be helpful. Most religions do not depend on what a person feels in regard to someone they are responsible for. What is required is the action and occasionally, when it is given, the ability to be open to the possibility of compassion for the one you are helping or serving in some way. Most religions insist that we never block compassion, especially when that compassion impacts how we end up feeling about the person in question. But feelings in themselves are pretty much irrelevant.

Compassion is not to be had on tap. It does not respond to the pressing of a button, as if it was the cappuccino option on a coffee machine. It is more like a hidden spring of water that surfaces when we’re not expecting it. So the feelings that accompany compassion have to do with seeing the person as they truly are, in all the vulnerability of their humanity, regardless of whether or not they want you to see them in this way, which they probably don’t.

Knowing this, means that the subject must be handled with great gentleness, even if they themselves are anything but gentle towards us. It means being gracious to the ungracious and the ungrateful (or seemingly ungrateful), to the irritable of temper, to the sullen and taciturn. It means passing over the snide or cynical remark made in passing (a way of covering emotions they are unaccustomed to and don’t know how to deal with) but hearing them enough for them to register as having been heard. In short, it means drawing on the reserves of grace at our disposal.

For Christians, grace is something we return to continually, in the way a young animal returns to its mother for nourishment. Where I live, we are surrounded by Spring lambs who are doing this all day, in the face of unseasonal rain and wind. They are exposed to these elements despite the closeness of their mothers and the nourishment they receive from her. I think the same is true for all of us when we are faced with emotional demands and commitments that can be just too much at any given moment. We draw sustenance from that hidden inner spring which somehow or other gets replenished as and when needed.

None of this has any bearing on what we feel, objectively speaking, and this is a relief. As long as negative feelings are left alone, they will ultimately wither, or at least diminish to manageable proportions for as long as the compassion is needed. They will no doubt surface later, but this is OK. The main thing is not to dig them over like well-rotted manure so that they start to feed our actions and attitudes in regard to the person in need of our compassion, and of our practical help.

The surprising thing about all this is that treated in the right way, the stuff that we would normally turn over and over, if left alone, starts to reveal itself in a quite different light. The grace factor merges into it, so that the one eventually becomes indistinguishable from the other. The rotten stuff becomes the stuff of grace, strengthening the bonds of affection that we perhaps never knew we had for the person we are trying so hard to love.

When The Going Was Good

It hasn’t rained for a few days here, although the rains are set to return tomorrow and remain for the foreseeable. This brief respite from the wet has given the ground a chance to drain and even dry out a bit in places, as I found yesterday while discovering a new walk. I couldn’t have done the walk for the first time if the ground had been sodden, for fear of sinking in and causing possible injury and then being stuck half way up a hill and out of mobile range.

These are the kinds of anxieties that beset us as we try to come to terms with advancing years. Being stuck somewhere, out of range, out of earshot. Growing older is not for the faint-hearted, not because we have to push harder to achieve goals or even climb steep hills without falling into the bog, but because of the reverse. We have to accept that much of the time we can’t do these things and it would be imprudent, and unfair on others, to try.

Acceptance is the first challenge in that stage of life when the going is not as good as it used to be and I think it will probably be the hardest, for me at least. You have to be by nature a patient sort of person to accept life as it is and I am not patient by nature. I like goals and deadlines. I like to get things done. I like to move around and discover new walks – in life as well as in the countryside. I am also someone who has spent most of their life with one foot in the future. There was always going to be something new and exciting just around the corner.

One of the biggest challenges of getting older is coming to terms with the fact that we are now living the future we were dreaming of in our younger years. Whether for better or for worse, it is almost certainly different. And it is the difference that matters. The difference is full of things that were not envisaged or planned for. They are the sum total of the present moment. They are worth relishing – even the not so good ones. By relishing I don’t mean a vaguely enforced sense of gratitude for character building unpleasant experiences, like a failed love affair, but the owning of what these occurrences felt like, how we dealt with them, how we would deal with them now, with or without the wisdom of hindsight.

By wisdom, I don’t mean the ability to make cuttingly clean decisions in regard to any one course of action, or to remain aloof and objective in every possible trying situation, or in regard to people who, try as one might, it is very difficult to like. Wisdom is won the hard way, in a gradual process of learning to understand at depth what it means to be human. In other words, to understand the significance of story.

If you have read this far, you will have a life story of your own. You will be concerned with making sense of your life story. This is not the prerogative of the old. It is an open invitation to anyone. Making sense of one’s life, however short or long it has been so far, involves connecting with other people’s stories, even if they have never told them. We only really understand ourselves (and so begin to forgive ourselves) when we understand others. The reverse is also true. The alcoholic parent was simply a human being who couldn’t cope, who was angry, felt betrayed and at some crucial point in their life, unloved. They have no means to work through these feelings, or to accept them, so their ‘anaesthetic’ as my mother used to call the gin and sherry mix which she reached for at eleven in the morning, lies in some form of mind-numbing drug.

Everyone has a story. Everyone brings to any experience a heady mixture of half-forgotten memories, of pain, joy, boredom, disappointment and various kinds of fear. Every person has their own fear, or numerous fears.

Most of us only come to terms with these fears later in life, when we realise what they are really about; the desire to please a parent, perhaps, or the fear of oblivion that keeps a person awake through the small hours of the night. We fear sleep as we fear death.

But it need not be like this. Sleep, even if we need a bit of chemical help for it to kick in, is ultimately about acceptance. It begins with the acceptance of the present day. There is always something to be grateful for, and by that I mean real gratitude, not the kind of enforced gratitude that comes with saying grace at meals. I mean the gratitude that comes with thinking ‘thank God that happened today…or didn’t happen’. It means acceptance. Acceptance is surrendering into the eternity of the present moment. Who knows which side of eternity we will wake to? One thing we can be sure of though is that Someone will be there to meet us. Thank God for that.