The above was the subject line of an
email I received last Saturday from a church member who has been engaging
deeply in our Lenten series on “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.” Each week,
we’ve been exploring the steps laid out in theologian and historian Karen
Armstrong’s book by the same title. Karen, who has many brilliant books
exploring the relationship between religion, culture, and history, was given a TED award which basically gave her the ability to make a wish that the TED
organization could help come true. Her wish was to create a Charter of
Compassion that would be shared globally and inspire people to live
compassionate lives. This book is the result of the TED award and her own
research into this vital need facing our
world today; the need to become more compassionate as individuals and as a
global community.
And it’s not easy. We have been so
conditioned to be cynical, judgmental, and rigid that our default is to get our
back up, to not trust, to assume negative meanings for other people’s lives,
even if we know nothing about them. Armstrong says in her book that these steps are meant to be worked
exactly like a 12 step recovery; you don’t move on to the next step until
you’ve completed, to the best of your ability, the step you’re currently on. A
couple of weeks ago, I preached on the trifecta of steps 7-9, which are How
Little We Know, How Should We Speak to One Another, and Concern for Everybody. These are hard steps
to take even on a local scale. We are so quick to condemn others who are different
from us in our neighborhood. Heck, in my
own life, less than a week after preaching about those three, I found myself
completely violating step 8 by insisting
that I knew the right response for a friend of mine to make in a matter that
had absolutely nothing to do with me. Only in retrospect did I realize I had
missed an opportunity to “lose” an argument rather than be right.
Still, there are those who go before us
to model for us a way of inclusion and acceptance for those who are different
from ourselves and who model ways to treat one another.
Take this example from when NFL Draft
Michael Sam came out as gay. Commentator Dale Hansen says it beautifully when he says, "I don’t understand his world; but I do understand that he is
a part of mine."
Or this one, handled equally well by the amazing
Dale Hansen on the subject of racist actions in high school.
Or this beautiful and courageous act of coming out of this young
trans boy, following the suicide of a 17 year old trans woman who wasn’t
accepted by those close to her.
These model a way of compassion that
completely aligns with Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion and definitely fills
in the blanks of these difficult to maneuver steps.
But, my friend who emailed me, and takes this seriously, wanted to go ever deeper. Here’s what he wrote: I’ve been working hard on the 12 steps to compassion. I’m struggling with the whole violence/non violence/ “just war” thing. I’m looking at a group like ISIS. They seem to have an ideology that is in part quite violent. Part of me thinks, okay, if we are really trying to be compassionate than we should try to find out what is bothering them and why they are doing what they are doing. The other part of me sees that it might not matter. If ISIS is causing lots of suffering, shouldn’t someone try to stop them in some way and it might mean violently? On the other hand, doesn’t that just breed more violence? Should we let them self destruct even if that means that they will kill many more? It makes me wonder about Nazi Germany. Many people say
World War 2 was the “last just war”
Hitler certainly killed many people and creating immeasurable
suffering. Should he have been stopped?
It’s like with civil rights. We say, let’s take a stand. Is there a point when it becomes too late for non violent stand? Is some violence okay in short term if you
are working on longer term non -violent solutions?
These are important questions, and questions we must address
if we are to move beyond the “kumbayah”
stage of pseudo-compassion and onto the hard and rocky path of real life/real
compassion. Pseudo-compassion is a lazy, shallow way of looking at the
world that simply says, “I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re okay together!” When in
reality we are not all always okay. There are actions that can’t be tolerated,
there are violations of human worth and dignity that cannot be swept under the
rug of indifference or vacuumed up into the black hole of pluralistic
relativism. Sometimes people—who were born with inherent worth and dignity and
have that as their core—do vile and unspeakable things to others that violate
that same worth and dignity in their victims.
What Karen Armstrong says about this in step 8 is that “there are of course times when we are
required to be assertive. Even when we have gone through this process and
understood the context in which a terrorist conceived his idea, we cannot, if
we take the Golden Rule as our criterion, condone the course of action he has
chosen. We have, however, broadened our horizons by developing an informed
understanding of the possible frustration, humiliation, and despair of his
situation and can now empathize with the plight of many of his innocent
compatriots and coreligionists, who may feel something similar but have not
resorted to criminal vengeance.”
In other words, the Golden Rule calls us to seek to
understand, not to condone, and certainly not to stand idly by while violence
is wrought by one group on another. I remember well the terrorist attack on the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001; the heroic crash of United Flight 93
in a field in Pennsylvania and the major sea change that brought to our sense
of safety and security as Americans. The overwhelming response to that was a record number of flags, flag bumper
stickers and other jingoistic emblems sold and an impulse to go to war. Very
few people took the time to reflect on what might make young Middle Eastern men
resort to such an atrocious act of terrorism. When ministers dared to preach on
that topic, they were often castigated by their own congregations. Admittedly,
many spoke too soon about our own culpability in those acts of terrorism
without giving adequate time for the grief and the shock to wash over our
collective consciousness and recede enough to allow time for reflection, but
even to this day, many want to paint with broad brush strokes the colors of
intolerance over a people and religion, to paint “them” the enemy rather than
looking at how US foreign policy and involvement in other countries might have
contributed to a sense of despair and helplessness for these young men, opening
up the door for radical fundamentalists—who act less in the name of Allah than
in the name of power—to corrupt their thinking so that we Americans were the
enemy- Satan incarnate—and the way to strike back was in great violence. Do you
see how we have painted them in the same colors they painted us?
The Golden Rule requires us to put away our paint by numbers
and instead to begin to explore the contours of a people and culture and
religion in real time, in real life, much like someone who is visually impaired
might “see” another through gently exploring the face of the other with
fingers; that up close and personal.
However, Armstrong goes on to remind us, “we must still
dissociate ourselves from his atrocity. Nor should the ‘principle of charity' make us passive and supine in the face of injustice, cruelty, and
discrimination. As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an
increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and resolve to
do everything we can to free them from their pain.”
She goes on to say that when we speak out in defense of our
values that we must make sure we understand the context fully and “do not
dismiss the values of our opponents as barbaric simply because they seem alien
to us. We may find that we have the same values but express them in a radically
different way.”
So for me, this means homework because, I
confess, the actions of ISIS in brutally killing people and destroying ancient
artifacts just seems cray-cray to me. I am tempted to shudder in revulsion and
disgust and paint them with those well worn colors we’ve been discussing. I
will never condone their actions or invite them to join hands as we sing Kumbayah,
but if I’m to seek to understand their actions I must admit that I don’t know
anything about them. I must seek to learn more of their history, of the
socio-economic, historical, cultural biases that led them to believe this type
of behavior is right. I must put away my own paint by number set and seek to
feel the contours of their faces, their lives, their struggle. I must admit I don't understand their world, but I do understand that they are a part of mine.
Then, and only
then, will I be able to have an informed opinion as to how we deal with them. And
even if we must meet violence with violence, at least that can be done knowing
we are going to war with humans just like us, shaped by their culture and
history, just as we have done, trying to
find their voice in the only way they know how. When we can at least stretch so
far as to be reminded of the fact that we are all equally monsters and angels,
depending on the perspective, then perhaps we can take greater care in how we
treat one another and work for a world in which all would feel seen and heard and
in so doing, dare to see and hear the “other,” too. If we can do it, so can
ISIS, so can people in our own nation from every political/ideological point of
view. We have those, such as Dale Hansen and Tom Sosnik and Michael Sam to show
us how to begin, with baby steps. And as we all can testify, once a baby starts
to walk, it takes no time at all to learn how to run. Let's run.
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