The Compassion Quest

Prologue: finding our purpose

    Life is beautiful and worth living and meaningful. Despite everything.

Etty Hillesum, 12 months before her death in Auschwitz

    May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

Franciscan Benediction

In Brian Selznick’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, later adapted into the hit movie Hugo by director Martin Scorsese, the eponymous 12-year-old hero discusses the meaning of life with his friend Isabelle. Pondering the clockwork machines that he had painstakingly restored, he comes to the conclusion that all machines are created by humans for specific reasons. ‘They are built to make you laugh, like the mouse here,’ he says, as the couple watch a wind-up mouse skittle across the table, ‘or to tell the time, like clocks, or to fill you with wonder.’ He then admits that broken machines bring sadness to his heart, as they are not fulfilling the purpose of their creation. ‘Maybe it’s the same with people,’ he concludes, ‘if you lose your purpose, it’s like you’re broken.’

The secular world has developed a deep-seated fear of the Christian concept of ‘sin’, holding that it induces an unhealthy amount of individual guilt. Such criticism is not without validity, and, as a result, even my colleagues in the Church are rarely brave enough to tackle the subject directly in their sermons or teaching. The musings of Hugo Cabret, however, hint at something of what the Bible is referring to when it asserts that we are living in a ‘sinful’ world. After all, in many ways we are alienated from our intended purpose. We live in a ‘broken’ world, which has lost its reason for being. But that, of course, is not the end of the story. Just as the orphan boy Hugo is brought hope and purpose through his young friend Isabelle, who is the first person for many years to show him compassion and love, it is in the quest for those very qualities, compassion and love, that all of us can find the reason for our existence.

In my last book, Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering, I intended to show that hope and meaning can be found even in the midst of great adversity. Our greatest gift in facing our suffering is the present moment, which is where God resides. It is in the here and now that we are able to connect with the world in all its wonder and thus touch the divine. The transcendent dwells in life’s details. He is present in the people we meet, in the beauty of nature, in the bliss of silence, in the comfort of our memories, and in the joy of laughter. In fact, we can find God in most of our seemingly ordinary and everyday experiences. ‘Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears,’ writes C. S. Lewis; ‘take in what there is and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else.’

This book is also about the present moment, but the emphasis is now widened. Not only do we appreciate that the here and now can bring meaning to our own lives, but we recognize, too, that our own present moments can bring light to the lives of others. We live in a society where achievements, wealth and success are, by and large, valued higher than altruistic actions. Responsibility for those suffering, for those in the throes of injustice and for environmental concerns is, therefore, sometimes overlooked, as individual endeavour and greed is, often unconsciously, championed. There are signs, however, that a new paradigm is emerging, where we are beginning to recognize that the cult of celebrity, the obsession of lust and the glorifying of power are false gods. In the words of T. S. Eliot, increasingly many of us no longer feel at ease ‘in the old dispensation’. By using the present moment to be present to each other, we can choose another way of living, as we stand alongside others who suffer and share willingly in their vulnerability, weakness and uncertainty. It is, after all, when we attune ourselves to love’s frequency that the quest for meaning, purpose and strength can be fulfilled.

This fact became particularly clear to me during two periods of my life. First, a number of years ago, I underwent a period of intense pain and suffering. During that time I was diagnosed with a degenerative back condition and underwent spinal surgery. For almost a year I was restricted to lying down at home – alone, unable to work, and limited to only short, pain-filled walks each day. One morning, I struggled downstairs to answer my front door. On the step stood a 24-year-old man, whom I had only met once before in passing, at a funeral at which I had officiated. The young man announced that he had heard of my back injury and knew that I lived alone, so he was wondering whether he could help with any household chores. For the next six months, James came over to my house regularly, at least once a week, and would do my washing up, empty my bins, and do my grocery shopping for me. Outwardly, his altruism offered no real gain for this popular and trendy young man, who was training to be a lawyer. His assistance was not born out of a sense of duty and it was not done for any payment. Furthermore, he was not a churchgoer, so there was no outward religious incentive. Yet his visits did not simply bring help to me at a time of helplessness. I recall him later disclosing to me that he had no real idea what had inspired him to offer support, but in his little acts of compassionate kindness he had found a meaning that was beyond anything he was experiencing in his life of partying and studying.

The other event that helped bring me to a realization that meaning and purpose are forged through compassion occurred in my first year of ministering in a church in Cardiff. A member of my congregation asked me to visit her work colleague’s father, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Over the next three months I visited Ray’s bedside regularly, and my time with him had a profound effect on me. I would always walk in to a barrage of abuse about my beloved Swansea City football team, as he was a fan of our greatest rivals, Cardiff City! The rest of the time with him was spent chatting, debating, laughing and crying. During the last two weeks of his life I visited him daily, often simply to hold his hand and then to drink coffee with his struggling family. At his funeral, his grieving wife told me that my presence at his bedside had brought much comfort and hope to this non-church-attender. Yet, in my mind, the purpose and meaning that had been engendered had been mutual in a way I would never have imagined, and I was walking away from our short association having been deeply affected.

Compassion in the present moment can certainly bring a purpose and reason to a world that seems to struggle with locating significance. Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering’s emphasis on the importance of discovering individual inner meaning rooted itself firmly in the biblical tradition, but it also laid its foundations in the Christian contemplative tradition. It particularly advocated two concepts that have been at the heart of contemplative Christianity down the centuries. The concept of awareness leads us to connect with the present moment in such a way that we can recognize it for what it truly is – a loving experience of the kingdom of God. Alongside this is the concept of acceptance, which, rather than being passive submission to hardships, is a transformative embracing of the reality of situations. There is, however, a third area that has underpinned much of the contemplative tradition down the ages, a concept that I left unexplored in my earlier book. This is interconnectedness, which values the mutual relationship between our inner being and the outside world.

The interconnectedness of God’s creation was briefly touched upon in the chapters on ‘Nature’ and ‘Helping others’ in Finding Hope and Meaning in Suffering, but the concept was generally sidelined, as the book was fundamentally inward-looking and centred on individual spirituality. This book attempts to redress the balance. Our spiritual journey, after all, must do more than merely assist us as individuals, lest it descend into a mere tool for self-help and positive thinking. Down the years, Christian spirituality has tended towards issues of our inner life, and, in recent years at least, even worship has become increasingly insular and me-focused. As a consequence, for many years Christians have been led away from a holistic reading of the Bible and theology. A truly biblical understanding of our spiritual life, however, relates to our whole existence, not least to our relationships with God, with each other, and with the rest of the created world. The US civil rights movement of the 1960s, for example, recognized the importance of such a holistic vision of spirituality. God was working through both personal and social dimensions of the civil rights leaders, and their personal relationships with God were inseparable from their tireless work for justice and reconciliation. Both dimensions complemented each other. Thus our personal spiritual lives are very much related to the social dimension of our lives. To separate our inward and outward journeys is to set up a false dichotomy. The two are inseparable parts of one experience, and we should never make rivals of soul and body, sacred and secular, spirit and flesh, or Church and world.

As such, any theological reflection on spirituality cannot ignore how imperative it is for us to give physicality to our inner lives. The words in any book on theology are as worthless as the paper they are written on if they remain merely black ink on the page. Our theology cannot remain incarcerated in academic textbooks or caged up in religious buildings. Karl Marx observed that philosophers tend to interpret the world, when they should be trying to change the world. Likewise, theology should not be about words, however useful they are for sharing ideas. Clarence Jordan warned of the consequences of incarcerating the Word (the logos) in intellectual pursuits:

    The Word became a sermon and was later expanded into a book and the book sold well and inspired other books until of the making of books there was no end. And the Word died in darkness and was buried in the theological library.

For the Word to thrive, theology should be not only about observing, but also about acting. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ very first words are to a group of John the Baptist’s disciples (John 1.35–39). ‘What do you want?’ he asks. The disciples respond, rather strangely, with another question: ‘where are you staying?’ Jesus answers with a simple invitation: ‘Come and see.’ Theology is about exactly that – looking and seeing, and then responding in action to what we have seen.

It was with this logic in mind that Hans Urs von Balthasar claimed that true theologians do not simply ruminate on doctrines, but rather they observe the life of Christ and then live out what they have seen. This is the only way, according to him, to true ‘sainthood’. The fact that so many Christians before us have not lived out the theology they espoused is a stark warning to us all. German guards at Auschwitz would sometimes wear belt buckles on their uniforms that proclaimed ‘God with us’, then sit at home in the evenings listening to Bach’s spiritual classics. Our theology and spirituality must never be something that is compartmentalized, kept away from our everyday routines. Rather, it must be integral to every part of our lives. As Etty Hillesum put it: ‘I keep talking about God the whole day long, and it is high time that I lived accordingly.’

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Faith and the universe

    Just as a circle embraces all that is within it, so does the Godhead embrace all. No one has the power to divide this circle.

Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century contemplative

    Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein

In Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, the main protagonist, Celie,