Leaning Toward The Light
You’re not alone if you feel like the world is on fire. I’ll leave the conversation about how we got here to the experts, many of whom disagree. I would like to weigh in, though, on how time-honored traditions encourage us to respond to conflict – even conflicts as extreme as the ones now. There, we can find some agreement. Wisdom traditions encourage us to respond to conflict with agendaless compassion, in other words, with compassion for absolutely everyone. That’s why the timing of Shauna Shapiro's new book that teaches self-compassion to children couldn’t be better.
Early in the conflict between Israel and Gaza, I listened to a conversation on NPR between Imam Mohamed Herbert and Rabbi Sharon Brous. The journalist, Ari Shapiro, asked the Rabbi and the Imam how they were counseling their congregations, and both offered examples from their traditions of ways to practice compassion that they planned to include in their sermons.
From Imam Mohamed Herbert: “[W]hen we speak about an internal response to how it is that we internalize everything that's happened, one of the key things that I hope for my community to step away from the sermon with is understanding that there is pain on both sides, right? Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, or God Almighty - he mentions in the Quran in chapter three, in verse No. 140, (speaking Arabic) - that if you have suffered injuries on the battlefield, understand that the opposition has suffered injuries and pain as well."
From Rabbi Sharon Brous: “[I]'ve been thinking about the end of the sixth day of creation, which is the first day that Adam and Eve are alive. And the rabbis tell us in the Midrash that at the end of the first day, when it grew dark - that Adam got really scared because he had never seen darkness before. And he started to weep and scream and cry. And Eve came over and just sat right across him and cried with him all night long until the dawn came. And I feel it's such a beautiful, powerful statement about how there's always a dawn that comes after even the deepest darkness. And our job as human beings is to come and sit with one another and hold each other in the sorrow until we can once again walk toward the light.”
On social media, Mingyur Rinpoche offered a compassion practice from the Buddhist tradition.
"In dealing with conflict, we should first contemplate that our adversary wants to be happy and be free from suffering, just as we do. Next, try to see things from their point of view. By looking at the situation from their perspective, we'll be able to see clearly who has the mistaken idea and who is in error. We will be able to see our own faults clearly, too. If, through this contemplation, we find that we are the ones in error, then we can begin to address those faults in ourselves. Should we confirm that, yes, the other person is the one who is confused and at fault, we'll still be able to see the situation with compassion. We'll recognize that they are trying for happiness, but they misunderstand how to attain it. They might be harming us and others too, yet we can understand that their behavior is impeding the happiness that they're trying to achieve."
Compassion isn’t limited to helping people whose views are the same as our own. Compassion is a genuine wish for health and well-being that extends to absolutely everyone. No picking. No choosing. Extending compassion to people who don’t see the world the way we do can be very, very hard. But, no surprise, that's when we need it the most.
Compassion toward absolutely everyone includes compassion toward ourselves. It doesn’t condone wrongdoing or excuse bad behavior, nor does it ask us to feel differently than the way we feel. All agendaless compassion asks is that we incline our hearts and minds in its direction —that we lean toward the light like sunflowers angle toward the sun. I can’t speak for anyone else, but this seems like a realistic intention to set for myself and a practice I can sustain. May it be so.