Do We See Compassion as a Weakness?

I’m a volunteer at the local office of a non-profit charitable organization. There, we often work with a couple of police officers whose job it is to help homeless people.

Recently, a young immigrant family – husband, wife and two small children – came to our office for help. They needed everything – jobs, food, a place to live and gas for the car in which they were living. We were able to help them only with some of those needs, excluding the lodging. So, we called one of the officers and he was able to get them into a shelter, but only for the night.

That night, I went home, as usual, to a warm bed. Late the next morning, the officer called me at home. He said he happened upon the family in a parking lot. They had had to leave the hotel and were in the car, trying to keep warm. One of the car’s windows wouldn’t close properly and they had a blanket stuck in the window to keep out the cold.

“I just can’t leave them in that kind of situation,” he said. “I’ve got to find them a place to stay.”

Wasn’t Going to Stop

He asked me to call the husband, who had a cell phone, and ask him to meet the officer at a specified location. The officer wasn’t going to stop until he found the family a more permanent place to stay.

I was impressed with the officer’s compassion. He could have just passed them by in the parking lot, knowing that he had at least found them a place to stay the night before. No one would have been the wiser.

When you stop to think about it, compassion is probably the most noble and most admired of human traits. The word itself, com-passion, means co-suffering, feeling the suffering of others to the extent that you do something about it. In my view, for people searching for God, it’s a reliable pathway to closeness with God, who – despite many people’s view that God is indifferent – is the model for compassion.

Peter Wehner, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, who attends a Presbyterian church in Virginia, recently wrote an article on the subject.

“Of all the qualities that the New Testament ascribes to God, compassion is among the most shocking,” writes Wehner. “Compassion has nothing to do with power, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many people think of when they contemplate God’s qualities.”

Regarded as a Weakness

The gods of antiquity were hardly ever portrayed as compassionate, he writes, because compassion was generally regarded as a weakness.

“Compassion, on the other hand, is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capacity to enter into places of pain, to ‘weep with those who weep,’ according to the Apostle Paul, who was central both to the early conception of Christianity and to the idea of its underpinning in compassion.”

The Hebrew Scriptures often portrayed a compassionate God. “But for Christians, there is an incarnational expression of that compassion. The embodiment of God in Jesus — the deity made flesh, dwelling among us — means that God both suffered and, crucially, suffered with others in a way that was a seismic break with all that came before.”

As uncomfortable as it may seem, Jesus was always concerned about righting the social, economic and religious injustices of his time, not by political activism but by person-to-person, compassionate contact with the disenfranchised of his day – day laborers, prostitutes, the unemployed, the homeless. We who are his followers are not always enthused about this idea, seeming to have a phobia about compassion.

Practically Non-Stop

Pope Francis has been talking about this subject practically non-stop since his election. Some of his most poignant statements are from his 2013 treatise called “The Joy of the Gospel.”

“Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them,” he wrote, “as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.

“The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”