Reflection
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If the sessions I attended at the 2021 Parliament of the World’s Religions shared a theme, it was their concern for the cultivation of compassion. Even in workshops or other sessions that weren’t advertised as being about compassion – but were instead about grief or land acknowledgement or peacekeeping or another topic – ended up touching on compassion. Perhaps this is expected at a gathering of people concerned with the spiritual. After all, to insist that spirit, that something beyond one’s own individual experience, is present in the joys and sorrows of life, in the world’s ways of (in)justice, and even in one’s everyday decisions, is in some way also to acknowledge common humanity, the possibility of shared hopes and anxieties. To acknowledge, in other words, the possibility of compassion. Or perhaps the common frame of compassion in the sessions I attended can be explained by the past 20 months of pandemic living; maybe I was unconsciously attracted to the idea of shared experience and mutual feeling after such a time of disorientation, disconnection, and stasis.
In either case, it makes sense that compassion’s salience holds as we come to the end of 2021. After all, the year has seen its fair share of troubling developments, and compassion counteracts human tendencies that exacerbate the pandemic, racism, forced migration, violence, and climate catastrophe that have made this year’s headlines. The protections offered by greed, individualism, and fear seem weaker when we recognize ourselves in the people these harm. Compassion also calls into question the institutions, the narratives, and the cultures that bury the causes of these ills too deep for one person, alone, to root out. Practicing compassion, we notice suffering in some or flourishing in others and, asking “why?”, reject a simple answer: “Because one deserves better than the other.”
In one workshop, I heard stories about peacemaking teams that are organizing in communities in Sri Lanka and Nigeria. In these teams, women develop relationships with other women from different religious communities, and call on those relationships to keep peace when events threaten to inflame tensions between those communities. These teams facilitate compassionate action as a constant reminder of humanity on both “sides” of nascent conflict. Team members recognize that conflicts are not so severe as to warrant violence, and that goals of safety and prosperity are shared.
These teams illustrate an important point about compassionate action: any human can practice compassion, but sometimes we also need space, structure, or tools to do so. No one had to teach the women how to have compassion for each other and those in their wider community; compassionate action came simply from the women getting to know each other, developing friendships, and sharing with each other about their lives. There were many other opportunities during the Parliament to learn about how to better practice compassion, to create the practices and disciplines that allow our innate talents for compassionate action to grow and take shape. The panelists during one session spoke about the space for compassion that can be carved out of all-encompassing grief. Without outlets of compassion during times of grief, sadness and guilt harden into resentment, fear, and self-pity. Two workshops presented on curricula for use in schools and communities to help cultivate compassionate practice, providing additional ways to spread tools that facilitate the expression of compassionate character.
I worry about what is lost when compassion is generalized, whether it is neutralized when it is removed from the people, the faiths, the communities where it is expressed. In teaching it, do we reduce it to an individual characteristic, or even an individual accomplishment? I do think this would be unhelpful, and see the risk of this in attempts to standardize and package compassion for an audience as broad as, well, the Parliament of the World’s Religions.
I find myself attracted to this notion of compassion that can be cultivated and trained. Indeed, I want to increase my own capacity for compassion towards others and towards myself, and I feel hopeful that our human tendency toward compassionate action can be awakened, shaped, and disciplined by both teaching and practice. I feel hopeful that more people practicing more compassion will be key to building the political and social power necessary to remake the structures in our world that immiserate and dehumanize.
