Does Compassion Mean What I Think It Means?

Compassion.  I think I know what it means to me, and I know my penchant for projecting onto others what I think it must also mean to them.  And more often than not, I come to learn what I have projected is not necessarily at all something means to another.   So difficult, finding the commonality of our languages, even when we speak the same language.  I would have surely thought compassion would have a somewhat universal meaning and would be a safe conversational word to express humane, spiritual and faith based concepts.

Apparently not so much in the faith based world.   Reading a post on Compassion at Better Than Believing blog this morning was an eye opener for me.   Translated from the scriptures and texts into the English may leave behind some of the intended meanings in the original writings.   Calls into question then, what it means to follow the popular belief of the Jesus teaching of compassion.

The differing meanings of the words compassion as cited in the post:

racham as compassion; Hebrew racham, which may have evolved from a root associated with cuddling a baby or little child, is frequently rendered compassion but has a variety of other meanings.

chamal, which originally may have meant commiserate; another Hebrew word. The difference between chamal and racham is that chamalnever seems to be connected with emotions but always suggests a decision about how to treat people

Two other Hebrew words are occasionally translated compassion: chen, which usually appears in English as grace or favor, and chesed, which most often is translated steadfast love or mercy.

The word that usually appears as compassion in the gospels must always be accompanied by a verb because the word in Greek, splagchnizomai, is a verb. It is based on splagchnon which means intestines, bowels, guts, or viscera. When a people today talk about having a visceral reaction to someone, like the authors and editors of the gospels they are acknowledging that intense emotions are experienced in the digestive tract. A crude but accurate translation of splagchnizomai would be torn up in the gut. In the gospels splagchnizomai usually describes a reaction of Jesus to the suffering or distress of other people. Occasionally the translators use the word pity instead of compassion.

His post then poses question about meaning of compassion as is typically understood from the biblical texts.  He suggests that making a virtue of compassion as if it is understood in the same way by all may not create a bit of a problem in understanding the meaning and intent of the teachings.  If as a visceral feeling, gut reaction, one feels it or one doesn't.  He then cites the well practiced masking people must do with their personal feelings in the helping professions in order to provide care (ie, doctors, nurses, EMT, etc) effectively.  

I well know the experience of needing to turn off personal feeling less my compassion be exhausted before a nine hour work shift is completed.  It provides a safety valve that permits me to do my job, helping large numbers of others, without depleting my personal resources.  I don't think my sense of compassion fully dissipates, but it is necessary for it to recede to the background in order to more effectively perform the helping services of my profession.

His post goes on to suggest that followers of Jesus must also learn to train themselves with regard to their personal sense of compassion so that they might provide a loving and merciful response within the context of how they experience their sense of compassion.

I intend to contemplate this for a while, incorporate it into my understanding of compassion, and revisit what I think the scriptures might be suggesting Jesus meant in use of the word compassion.  It sounds like there are differing meanings applicable to different situations.  

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Mormonism of Yesteryear's Pioneer Spirit

It would not be complete to not include the link to this post by Holly Welker; Latter-Day Saints and Modern-Day Pioneers, which generated in me a culmination that it has become  time or even past time for me to lift up my voice with my husband's voice in honoring the spirit, integrity and courage displayed by his familial ancestors as reflective of the pioneer spirit of Mormonism.  I can admire the story, the people, the experience and relate to it strongly as it mirrors for me that deeply held faith beliefs can sustain horrific life experiences. 

I do believe believe that through arduous reflection, introspection, and determination, faith can help rescue human pain, human hurt.  I am not of the belief that there is some immediate miraculous lifting of the anguish, but that faith is a process and like many  processes, it evolves in increments, steps, time and experience. I think for the most part humans will experience varying kinds of levels of deep pain, deep hurt that need the balm of healing.  And I believe a combination of factors to include reaching out for or holding onto faith can be that balm.

My husband's  viewpoint on his ancestral story is better told in his own book 'And Should We Die', which is not an effort on my part to promote his book in this post; more that his own words tell the story of how he feels about his ancestral heritage and story.   Given what I have come to learn about this fateful and dangerous trek and the costs in terms of loss of life of men, women and children, I do not share quite the same viewpoint as my husband.  We do share in common a mutual admiration for the people who were his relatives, who made that trek, who brought his family to the West. 

In that vein, when I read Holly Welker's post, I let out a hoop and holler of Yes!  A person who not only shares my viewpoint but brings additional material to the discussion, offering up resource material for me to seek out and digest.  Bringing me to an almost 'aha' moment, which generated in me the desire to initiate this blog. 

Quoting from her post;

  As far as I'm concerned, my activity in the Mormon church is irrelevant to my identity as a Mormon. Mormons call themselves saints; I suppose these days I'm a secular saint rather than a devout one. But that indelible mark made on the collective Mormon psyche by the trek across the plains? It's as vivid and deep on my psyche as on anyone's. What it marks is not my relationship to orthodoxy but to sacrifice, landscape, the unknown, and change.

I am proud of and humbled by the actions of my ancestors. They abandoned the familiar and strode bravely into the unknown, confident that doing so would enable a better future. They gave up possessions, relationships that no longer nurtured them, ideologies they had outgrown. They did the hardest thing they could, both because they could and because they had no other choice.

I cannot count the number of people who have said to me,"I have profound doubts about the church -- its politics, its doctrines, its social structures. I don't always feel at home. But I'll never stop attending or voice certain doubts in public because that would render the sacrifices of my ancestors null and void."

And I say, "How is doing the opposite of what your ancestors did the best way to honor their actions? Isn't the best way to honor their examples simply to follow it?"

I currently live in Salt Lake City, with ample opportunity to celebrate Pioneer Day: concerts in the tabernacle, a ball, a powwow, fireworks, the obligatory parade. I'll probably skip it, because these days Pioneer Day is about settling down, when the spirit that made the arrival in the Salt Lake Valley possible in the first place was about rising up. Mormons today are instructed to submit to authority, when the impetus for the trek across America was rejection of authority.

So this year I celebrate by imagining the Pioneer Day parade of my latter-day dreams. The marshals of my parade wouldn't be men who make pronouncements about doctrine, but the contemporary pioneers who challenge and remake the ways Mormons lives their day-to-day lives.

Read more at the link, and the resource material she has posted.

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Literalism, another way to look at it

 

I have come to value that one of the pitfalls my formerly devout (in other words, accepted by the LDS mainstream) husband was his experience of a literal faith, which proved to have holes too big for him to ignore, followed by his need to resist the literalism of his faith community. 

In the either/or literal sense, his resistance was truly more his own effort to deepen his faith within the context of his faith community.  What he met with were too many who offered him the black or white literalism - if you are not for it, do not believe it, do not accept it, then you have lost your way, are listening to another force, are out of step and compliance with the homogeneous belief requirements. Would that his resistance have met with people who could offer him a more meaningful way to wear and use his faith, acknowledging his need to be out of compliance as part of his quest to deepen his faith.

My journey with him began at the time of his questioning, and I can only speculate what his life in the literal belief may have looked like, felt like to him.  Before I knew much of the community of LDS or Mormonism, I only knew of some of what is described as the peculiarities of Mormons - the usual array of things like their undergarments, the history of polygamy, the strong family bond, and an arrogance that they believed they had the only truth there is to have in such matters as faith, family, God.  What was more relevant to me than what the beliefs were, was his carriage of himself, the obviousness (to me) of his deeply held faith, and that there was a goodness about him that I had to conclude came about as a result of his heritage, his culture and his beliefs.   I have oft wondered if there was a way in which to accept aspects of the faith minus the literalism and still be able to hold to the faith-based tenet of the narrative.

My experience of religions considered to be traditional and mainstream Christian is that they too have holes too big to ignore, and again it seems literalism is a core cause of the need to resist by questioning.  It is the questioning process that I believe strengthens the faith.  It is the faith, I believe, that then strengthens the belief.  The two seem incompatible at times. I could never, for example, say that I believe with absolute certainty and unequivocably that a conceptual storyline is reality or truth, rather that it points to inner, deeper, personal truths that need to be nurtured over time and experience in order to more fully manifest in one's personal life.

Coming across the post Avoid The Temptation of Literalism, by Steve P. at bycommonconsent corresponds well to my take on the matter, and I'm actually a bit surprised to find it so well articulated from inside the LDS community.

To borrow Steve's words from the post;

This is why reading the scriptures a scientific text does such violence to their purpose. They are designed to connect us subjectively, consciously and spiritually to richer truths and meaning. To use the scriptures to pull out objective facts about the physical world and its history is to tear them way from what they are there to ground. Literalism is like giving a child a calculus book as a stepping stool to reach a washbasin. In so doing, much is lost that lies with the proper use of the book. Certainly children need footstools, but such use misses the true potential the book has to offer.

  and

The scriptures are sacred. They allow us to touch the deepest truths available. To use them to read the surface of physical things (for which they are not intended and for which they don’t lend themselves) is a mistake that leads us away from where science is strong and should be used (as Elder Oaks points out) and, worse, wrenches the scriptures away from the beauty and truth they have to offer.

My husband has posted thousands of words expressing just such thoughts in his earnest need to indict literalism in any religion.  He and I have shared many hours of conversation and discussion over the past sixteen years of our lives together.  I'm not as likely to spend the amount of time, energy or resources as he has used in pointing to the flaw in a literal interpretation of what many consider the 'sacred' book.  As we have shared our thoughts, feelings with each other, I believe our sense of faith and belief has evolved and that while we share much in common in our connectedness at a spiritual level, we might have somewhat dissimilar verbalized belief sets.  It is extremely difficult to have any kind of conversation about religion, beliefs, faith because the language one eventually must employ has so many words that are 'charged' with meanings as defined for us, rather than words we can use and define for ourselves. 

Yet he and I have persevered in sharing such discussions, and when it gets close to the heart of the matter, to the faith of our child selves and the intellect of our adult selves, a reconciliation must take place for the faith to grow and mature.  I see us at this place in trying to find our own definitions. 

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It’s American Migration History

I am not sure why I found myself agitated after reading the book, and in talking to my husband who has written and published his own book ‘And Should We Die’ on the same subject, I came to realize some of the reasons for the agitation. My husband, is a descendant of one of the ancestors of the Martin handcart company; Mary Crossley. He did not know that when he wrote his book, and the sensitive and tender manner in which he handled the characters and subject is one of his many attributes which attracted me to him.

In appreciating, respecting, and admiring that he has such a proud ancestral heritage and lineage, I began to feel like I needed to learn more about my own lineage. And I set about to do so, learning of a strong maternal Norwegian emigrant lineage and an equally strong paternal German emigrant lineage. But that is as far as it got for me – people’s names but not so much their stories. I have to admit I envied my husband who had actual accounts and stories of his emigrant English lineage in the Mormon migration under Brigham Young . Having learned of and read my husband’s book, I had a great empathy for the hardships the people of the handcart companies endured in their pilgrimages, with the Willie and Martin handcart companies enduring the unendurable.

Reading the later book by David Roberts, ‘Devil’s Gate, Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy’ I found myself in an uneasy place in recognizing this historical migration does not belong strictly to Mormon history but more appropriately belongs to American history. The unease for me, I think, comes in the efforts by the LDS Church to minimize the extent of the cruelties and hardships endured by the emigrant migrants in making their way from native countries to the great Zion of Salt Lake Utah by a means prescribed by one man – Brigham Young and adhered to by his ardent followers – the early Mormons.

Essentially I am struck by how it was conceivable in his mind (Brigham Young) that women, children, men should travel in approaching winter months across the Rocky Mountains with so little in the way of clothing and food; much less the tortuous manner of travel in the energy required to be exerted in pulling handcarts minus anything resembling conditions facilitating the necessary amount of sustenance required to do so day after day.

With an inaccurate record of the recorded deaths along the treks of both the Willie and Martin handcart companies, it is nonetheless considered by history to be one of the greater tragedies of the American migration westward, with an exceedingly high number of (un-necessary) deaths. The number of deaths from the combined Willie and Martin handcart companies could be put at approximately 200, exceeding the number of deaths on the historically famously known Donner Party pilgrimage.

In what appears to be a long term historical effort by the LDS Church to turn human travesty and needless suffering into a story of faith and testimony elevating the LDS Church and beliefs, at the expense of the real faith of those who suffered, I find that I have come to resent the presentation of this history that has been so guarded by the Church in a false belief that it belongs to Mormon history. As long as it is permitted to belong to Mormon history, the narrative of the story is colored by the agenda of the LDS Church. That I do not resent, but rather understand and permit that the Church like any other institution wishing to present itself in a more favorable light will write the narrative to it’s own agreeable satisfaction.

However, the history of the Willie and Martin handcart company does not belong strictly to Mormon history, nor does the LDS church have ownership of the narrative. It is a history that better belongs to the whole of American history, and not in the glorious form of hardy, valiant and persevering souls as is presented in Mormon history but to be added to the numerous tragedies that abound in the American history of westward migration.

I recommend the book and even taking into consideration that the author wished to compile the content in a way as to point to accountability and culpability of Brigham Young and his adherents in this fatalistic crossing, one cannot help but come away from the book disturbed with the mechanisms that fostered the horrific conditions suffered by the people of these two handcart companies who undertook the journey. Their Personal Faith is a testament to Faith with a capital F. I am not sure it is a testament or testimony to the belief set of the LDS Church or Mormon beliefs, but I absolutely know it is a testament of Faith.

How dare the LDS Church take credit unto itself for the strength and determination of the personal faith of those pioneering souls!They came and they persevered with an internal and personal faith beyond the comprehension of the LDS Church. I claim their courage as a testimony to human capacity of internal faith that fosters extraordinary human endurance in the face of great odds. I believe such faith rarely belongs exclusively to any Church but is unto itself the depth of which faith can help humans to persevere in the face of much adversity.

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