Living Compassion
A SERMON BY REV LINDA A HART
We used to say in my ministerial training that most ministers have only one sermon to preach in their lives. Maybe if you’re especially wise and exceptionally deep you might get to have one and a half or inch up on having two, but for most of us, there’s a single sermon.
The trick, we always said to each other, is to find a sermon that’s sufficiently malleable and broad to seem to be lots of other sermons along the way.
It’s sort of the reverse of a resolution that was put before a business meeting of the American Unitarian Universalist Association back in the 1970s. Like our own GA, there are resolutions about whatever issue anyone might want to raise, and this one year someone with tongue planted firmly in cheek offered a resolution against evil.
A kind colleague has found a copy of it for me, and I share it with you:
WHEREAS, Evil has existed in this world ever since God invented the snake, and has done a number on decent people everywhere practically every day,
AND WHEREAS, at no time has Evil done anyone any good, but keeps causing bad things to happen,
AND WHEREAS, Evil lurks in the hearts of people regardless of race, culture, colour or creed, causing controversy and divisiveness even among those who try to do the right thing always,
AND WHEREAS, no matter how you look at it, Evil is rotten, and has created nasty problems,
THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED that Evil is the root of all little evils; and that all Unitarian Universalists stamp out Evil wherever it is found, so that no one shall hear it, see it, speak it, or do it ever again; and so that only Good shall everywhere prevail.
Bruce Clary, the author suggested it would stamp out any further resolutions by making it possible to just refer back to this one. Don’t like pollution or climate change? See the Resolution to Stamp Out Evil. Want to rid the world of AIDS or malaria? Resolution to Stamp Out Evil. Starvation in Africa? It’s covered. There’s very little that we might want to protest against that doesn’t fit under this.
In a like manner, I’m finding that there are two general headings that will cover about everything that I might want to speak about. I suspect that you all know this better than I do: one thread is compassion, the other is how we learn to live our faith. Today offers me the opportunity to wind them together in a very intentional explicit way.
It was a lucky thing, I suppose, then that our wider movement, the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches at our meeting last spring agreed unanimously to become a partner organisation with the Charter for Compassion. Being a partner isn’t just signing on, and feeling proud of ourselves. In order to be a partner, we have to commit to the work of growing compassion in the world. A first movement in this work is simply to begin to open in compassion ourselves.
First, a little background on this:
Karen Armstrong was given a chance to create something in the world, and was given support and help and funding to do so and she chose to create an organisation that is dedicated to reminding us about compassion. We read the words of the Charter this morning, a document that was created in dialogue between people of differing faiths, and, some might say, no faith. Armstrong realised from her study of the world's religions that if there is one message that is repeated in every culture and every religion around the world it is some version of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or in its negative expression – as it is expressed by Confucius , do not unto others as you would not have them do to you.
She realised as well that this basic understanding has been lost if not trampled in modern life and needs a new life, new breath, it needs to be brought back into our consciousness. We – as individual human beings and as a larger community and the world – we need to be called back to a deeper practice of compassion.
This isn’t a matter of enlivening pity or, in it’s least profound meaning, charity. This isn’t giving money to the appropriate organisations so that they can do the work of tending the sick and the hungry and those in prison. Bringing compassion to the centre of our lives is not a matter of sentiment only, but rather a willingness to be present and responsive to each other, to the rest of the human family, and to the web of life that upholds us.
These are lovely words, I know, these words that I speak, and the words of the Charter. Lovely words. And it is one of the most accurate criticisms of religions that they are all about the lovely words, but the truth of life exists outside of those lovely words and brave sentiments.
How do we make it something more than that? How do we do something more than read the lovely words? How do we remember this tomorrow afternoon or on Thursday at 2 in the afternoon? How do we make this something more than a collection of lovely words spoken on a Sunday morning?
The first step is the personal step. How do we as people open in compassion? It takes remembering some basic truths, some of those seemingly simple bits.
Compassion asks us to open our hearts. You can begin by simply not looking away. By not averting your eyes. You don’t have to own the troubles of the world, take them on as your private project for self realisation, but you can look. Observe. See what is there. It is sometimes not easy, but to open our hearts we need to see what there is around us. Be willing to open your heart by looking.
You can begin by listening. Hearing the voices of those who are in need, hearing the voices of those who are in dire circumstances. I was moved last year when a radio show I listen to offered the perspectives of some American soldiers who are fighting in Iran. This show created an opportunity for their poetry, their journals, their short stories about the world as they saw it. And it is not just listening to the voices of the dispossessed and the lost, but listening to each other. It’s listening for the answers to the questions that the poet David Whyte asks: ‘I want to know,’ he says, ‘if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others.’ For the truth is that we have all been there in that place of deepest despair, in the presence of our sure defeat. It is present in everyone. Be willing to open your heart by listening.
As we come to know that we share those experiences with all the world, with those we love and with those we revile, as we come to know that we are as one with each other, what grows isn’t that sense of obligation, but, I trust, a flowering in the heart of intention and action both.
Matthew Fox says
Compassion is not the eleventh commandment. Why not? Because it is...a spirituality and a way of living and walking through life. It is the way we treat all there is in life – our selves, our bodies, our imaginations and dreams, our neighbours, our enemies, our air, our water, our earth, our animals, our death, our space and our time. Compassion is a spirituality as if creation mattered. It is treating all creation as holy and as divine. . . which is what it is.
So we see. And we listen. And we open our hearts. We try to be kind. We try to remember. I hope that connection with an intentional religious community is one way to keep this sort of vision in front of us, that part of the purpose of our gatherings here is to keep reminding ourselves, reminding each other to look, to listen, to open, over and over again.
As I noted early on in our service, there’s also an opportunity to gather in a more intentional group and spend a year building a more intentional practice of compassion.
What matters, of course, isn’t the path that takes you into greater compassion. It is doing it, being it, living it in whatever small ways you can.
It is our challenge both as individuals and as a community to remember. To not forget. To see. To listen. To open our hearts and to act. Remember and forget, forget and remember. It is the way of these truths that are simple but not easy.
As there are themes for preachers that they cannot let go, so it is also that there can be themes for lives. May our theme for our lives be at least in some measure, to live out compassion each day, each moment.
Amen.
Prayer
Let us pause in the quiet of these few moments, to hold in our hearts
this vision,
this possibility,
the hope of hopes,
and love of loves,
that on earth there might be harmony.
Lives and loves
blended into a splendid song,
sung in languages beyond number,
in voices faint, and voices strong
men, women, children all joined,
all the world gathered in one choir,
not celestial, but grounded – rooted – in the earth.
Eternal spirit,
may our intentions be joined with all those
who work for peace
who embody love
who enact compassion,
that the world we know may become more and more like the world we dream,
where close up, in easy sight,
there is harmony,
the hope of hopes, the love of loves
resonates through every heart on earth.