Mount Shoop just keeps coming with wonderful words about compassion. Dispositions of compassion balance out the important descriptive power of sin by creating spaces for grief apart from judgment. Compassion does not exclude sin and judgment, but it locates them within a more complicated understanding of the human situation. Compassion suffers with, while working to understand the conditions that gave rise to the suffering in a broader sense. But it does not try to justify suffering. Compassion does not blame the victim; and it does not condemn the perpetrator without some sense of how those who are at fault also embody the tragic nature of human embodied life. Compassion is not afraid to love others enough to hold them to its own standards, but it does not demonize. It suffers with, but that is not all. Not letting suffering have the last word means making space for what needs to be better. Compassion sits with loss, and it hopes for better. It does not rush grief as a way to hurry though the pain. Compassion pushes toward a new quality of life in which we are able to live with loss honestly at the same time that it breaks through isolation and despair. Once again it is one line, among many, that catches me. "Compassion is not afraid to love others enough to hold them to its own standards, but it does not demonize." As we live in a broken world, we are all in need of some re-formation. That is a life-long process in which we are willing to see all sides of things without having to destroy or cast the other down and out. That is when we will find ourselves in that 'space' that allows for things to be healed and get better. That place is traditionally called salvation. It is a place in which we are able to see the wide bounds of God's gracious love without having to put our restrictions on it. When we are able to see the hopefulness of what is coming, we are empowered to move and change and come to a place that knows of our brokenness but also see that there is something more - something into which we really can move and live. Connection: God makes us a compassionate people. It is by the power of such love for us that we become able to stand with and alongside anyone that may come alongside us and love them enough to simply care for them and help them move along the way. Gather us as one, O God, that all may see how your grace creates a new day as we make our way alongside the lives of others.. Amen. |
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