Give me a little compassion

I always like to work on services. It gives me a chance to look at things and think about a topic in a different way; I become an explorer. I have to seek out information from all different angles and challenge what I know about the topic at hand. I know that I am not alone in this experience; each of us who prepares a service goes through a similar process. In the end, the presenter has the opportunity to learn more than the person who is the listener. That’s funny because we think it’s the other way around.

And while I always thought that compassion was a good thing, I didn’t understand that it might be at the root of total personal and global transformation. I know that we all know this but to illustrate the point, think about a situation where you have having an argument with someone. They are saying one thing and you are saying another. When you try to explain yourself, they say something that is opposite or add something to the conversation that just doesn’t fit.

You say to yourself, “I really don’t like that person right now” or more pointedly, “Why are they being SO stupid?” Now think of the space that opens when we stop ourselves and think about what THEY might be feeling in that moment. If it’s your best friend, your mother, father, sister, brother or spouse, you can imagine how they are probably not happy about having an argument. And as long as you’re thinking about them, you might think, I wonder if they’re tired. Did they have a hard day? And as you were thinking of them, whether they were sad that you two were fighting or whether they had a challenging day, I bet that you might find that you too are sad that you’re fighting or that you might discover something in your day that was really hard for you. If nothing else, you have added a new thought to “why are they being SO stupid, and the situation would be transformed.

That’s the funny thing about compassion, when we give compassion to another person, it benefits ourselves as well as the other person.

In working on this service, I found a few quotes from the Dalai Lama, the head of state and the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. In accordance with Tibetan tradition, His Holiness was recognized at the age of two, as the reincarnation of his predecessor the 13th Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lamas are the manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion who chose to take rebirth for the purpose of service other human beings.

Here are a few quotes:
“If you shift your focus from yourself to others, and think more about other’s well-being and welfare, it has an immediate liberating effect.

“If you utilize compassion, it will bring you tranquility and strength.

“The spiritual actions we undertake which are motivated not by narrow self-interest but out of our concern for others actually benefit ourselves.

“The more we focus on others, the more we have a concern for others, it seems to bring an inner strength.

And while every religion has at its core some form of compassion – which is actually thought of as the Golden Rule. Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.
Religious scholar Karen Armstrong, who was Ware Lecturer at General Assembly this past June, said that at the core of all religious belief is compassion and connection. In her book, 12 Steps to a Compassionate Life, she writes: “The first person to formulate the Golden Rule as far as we now, was the Chinese sage Confucius (551-479 BCE) who when asked which of his teaching his disciples could practice “all day and every day” replied: “Perhaps the saying about shu (‘consideration”). Never do to others what you would not lie them to do to you.” This he said, was the thread that ran right through the spiritual method he called the Way (dao) and pulled all ifs teachings together.

I liked this idea of a thread that ran through everything and pulled all its teaching together. I imagined a large sheet in the center of our circle, in which placed all of the details of our lives. I imagined holes in the sheet and that we could take weave this thread of compassion around the top and pull the whole sheet together. How would our world be transformed if we thought of it as engulfed, made whole by, contained within, held together, blessed and imbibed by compassion.