Defining Goodness
Think of the word “compassion,” and if you’re a Christian—or even if you’re not—chances are that the Good Samaritan comes to mind.
The traveler who took a detour from his journey to care for an injured man from an enemy tribe is so synonymous with unselfish care that churches, hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, orphanages, thrift stores, food pantries, and international relief agencies bear the name. There’s even a legal provision called the “good Samaritan” law, which grants civil immunity from blame to someone who renders assistance in an emergency.
The moral of the story is simple. Right? Remember the dialogue that preceded the parable: A lawyer was quizzing Jesus about what it meant to love his neighbor. “And who is my neighbor?” he asked. Jesus responded with the good Samaritan story.
Compassion and its absence have certainly been on display during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Diocesan websites, the local newspapers, and national publications have told tales of great unselfishness. Medical workers and first responders risking their lives. Donations to ministries increasing along with demand. Neighbor helping neighbor and stranger helping stranger.
Then there are the other stories, the ones about people who say to let old people die to save the economy.
And there are stories in between. Some of the heartwarming do-gooder stories have a darker side, Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Yorker. A story about a teenager collecting money for classmates who would have no lunch without school points to the inequities of our society. “We can be so moved by the way people come together to overcome hardship that we lose sight of the fact that many of these hardships should not exist at all,” Tolentino wrote.
Many people are wondering whether anything will be changed for good after the pandemic is all over, whether there are lessons we will take to heart, whether as a society we will be more compassionate.
The roots of the word “compassion” are from Latin words meaning “to suffer with,” so “compassion” means literally to feel another’s pain. The late John Claypool, an Episcopal priest, looked at the Samaritan in the story as someone who had suffered and who wanted to keep others from suffering as he had—transposing his own wounds into “awareness, sensitivity, and compassion.”
Henri Nouwen called the concept the “wounded healer.” Compassion “asks us to go where it hurts, to enter places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish,” he said. “Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”
Digging deeper, there’s more to the concept of compassion than smearing salve on someone’s wound. The application may be soothing, but its effect is only temporary. To apply a balm and then move on with life is one action. It may not really be neighboring. Not, at least, for the long haul.
Think about how the concept of “foreign missions” has changed. Not too many decades ago, the United States sent missionaries overseas to take Christianity to the heathens. They weren’t just exporting the teachings of Christ; they were making Jesus into a middle-class American by attaching immense cultural trappings to the faith. Today most mainline denominations try to “partner with” rather than “minister to” people in other countries. And surprise! Americans are actually learning valuable lessons from other cultures.
The way the good Samaritan story is usually taught has a tinge of that old “foreign mission” philosophy, according to Shawn Duncan of the Lupton Center, a nonprofit organization that transforms communities by empowering residents. Many a Sunday school lesson has focused on the “otherness” of the two travelers. When the rescuer paid the innkeeper and went on his way, the encounter ended, as far as readers can tell, with no further relationship. What if the story went on to say that the two had become acquainted? Gotten to be friends? Worked together to make the road safer for travelers?
Duncan tells a story about himself. He moved into an Atlanta neighborhood with a large refugee population. Thinking he had “to put flesh on God’s love in this place,” he said, he had the attitude that “this group of people will only survive if I help them.”
He learned, however, that “my refugee neighbors didn’t need a missionary. They wanted a neighbor.”
Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program in Los Angeles, puts it this way: “Compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others; it’s about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. ‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate’ means the dismantling of barriers that exclude.”
Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s School of Divinity, extends the story further. “To speak of loving God and loving neighbor does not require theological precision,” she writes in Short Stories by Jesus. “It does not ask for a particular location of worship (Gerizim, Jerusalem, Mecca, the Ganges, or Ssogoreate…), it does not speak to a particular book (the Torah, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Christian Bible, the Quran or the Book of Mormon…) Loving God and loving neighbor cannot exist in the abstract; they need to be enacted.”
Confucianism “Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.”
Hinduism “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.”
Islam “Not one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what he desires for himself.”
Judaism “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man.”
And to truly enact them means coming to terms with the personhood of people society says we should hate. “Can we finally agree that it is better to acknowledge the humanity and the potential to do good in the enemy, rather than to choose death?” she asks. “Will we be able to care for our enemies who are also our neighbors? Will we be able to bind up their wounds rather than blow up their cities? And can we imagine that they might do the same for us? Can we put into practice that inauguration promise of not leaving the wounded traveler on the road? The biblical text—and concerns for humanity’s future—tell us we must.”
Compassion is more than action. It’s an attitude. Major world religions and philosophies all have in common some version of the golden rule. For Christians, it’s the admonition to love your neighbor as yourself and, in everything, to do to others as you would have them do to you.
Treating people as we would want to be treated certainly means not patronizing or belittling them, not seeing them as somehow foreign or different or less.
Seeing strangers and even enemies as, like ourselves, beloved creations of God can change the present. But to change the future, we should consider one more step. The late William Sloane Coffin, who served as Yale University chaplain and pastor of New York’s Riverside Church and who was one of the most progressive white Protestant voices of the civil rights movement, said we have to put advocacy with action.
“To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving,” Coffin wrote.
One way of thinking about Coffin’s assertion is to buy into the concept that when one person is diminished, everyone’s value is decreased.
Homeboys Industries founder Boyle has as his goal not just compassion but kinship.
“With kinship as the goal, other essential things fall into place,” he writes. “Without it, no justice, no peace. I suspect that were kinship our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it.”
Action plus attitude plus advocacy. Maybe compassion is the starting point, not the goal. Compassion can lead to neighboring, which can lead to friendship. Friends can become co-laborers, co-laborers can become partners, and, working together, partners can change the world.
In the meantime, just being present—symbolically taking a detour from our own busyness to give someone else priority without judgment—can make a difference, at least to that person.
“When all is said and done, all you can do is to show up for someone in crisis, which seems so inadequate,” Anne Lamott wrote in Traveling Mercies.
“But then when you do, it can radically change everything. Your there-ness, your stepping into a line of vision, can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding. So you come in to keep them company when it feels like the whole world is falling apart, and your being there says that just for this moment, this one tiny piece of the world is OK, or is at least better.”
