The need for compassion

LET’S give due attention to this particular and strategic need of ours. Many prevailing circumstances today tend to make us focused simply on ourselves, not necessarily because of bad motives. But we have to be careful because these circumstances somehow keep us from entering into the lives of others which is what we ought to do.

                There’s the pressure of work, the concern for personal development, the requirements of our task at the moment, etc. All these are legitimate and should be expected, but they should not dull our sense of duty to be involved in the lives of others.

                Aside from these legitimate circumstances, we unfortunately also have a growing number of disturbing developments that undermine our compassion for the others. The culture of self-seeking and self-assertion is dominating. They tend to confine people into their own private, isolated worlds.

                We have to be concerned for the others. The ideal attitude is that we should always be thinking of the others, not to be nosey, but rather to help in any way we can. 

               

                Always thinking of the others is actually a very pleasant thing to do, although at the beginning when we are still learning it, we have to grapple with some temporary disagreeable moments.

                But the moment we master it, it becomes really nice. That’s because we are actually made for the others, that is, to enter into intimate communion with them in mind and heart. It’s this state of communion that fills us with a most gratifying sense of fulfillment. 

                We should not forget that this communion with the others is also the way to our communion with God. We can never say we are with God unless we are also with the others. Loving God and loving the others always go together. They are inseparable.

                Compassion is a very specific way of achieving communion with the others. It involves feeling for the others, for their needs and desires. It involves making the concerns of the others our own too.

                Compassion has to be understood properly, and pursued, learned and lived continually. Given our human condition, we develop compassion in stages. We have to start by thinking of the others in a more stable way—praying for them, offering some sacrifices, and noting interesting details in the lives of the others.

                All these should be motivated by faith, hope and charity. And that’s why, we also need to strengthen and enliven these fundamental virtues which connect us directly with God who is the source and end of everything.

                Otherwise, we will just be guided by insufficient criteria that will sooner or later lead us to some dead-end if not to some trouble and complications. The compassion that is driven by faith, hope and charity enables us to love God and others properly, avoiding indifference on the one hand, and sentimentalism on the other.

                Christ, of course, is the perfect model of how to be compassionate. When people were carrying the body of the son of a widow, he was immediately moved to compassion, and without being asked, he raised the fellow to life again and brought him back to his grieving mother.

                He was always thoughtful of the others, anticipating and meeting their needs. Obviously, his greatest act of compassion is when as the Son of God, the second person in the Blessed Trinity, he became man, and even went to the extent of assuming the sinfulness of men while not committing any sin at all.

                His passion and death on the cross constituted the supreme act of his compassion for us. He returned divine goodness to man who lost it due to our sin, and he did this in a gratuitous way. He was not obliged to do so, but chose just the same to do it out of his love for us.

                This is a truth that we should always relish, because it will spark in us impulses of compassion also towards others. This compassion is shown best when we have to give it to someone or in a situation that is most disagreeable to us, where we can say we would gain nothing in return.

                This is the compassion of God, completely gratuitous, never forced and neither imposing conditions on the recipient. God simply waits for that compassion to be returned with compassion.

                For this is the law of compassion and love, in general. When given away, it is not lost, but rather it becomes more and can spread and inspire others to show and give it.