Suffering and Compassion
(In Memoriam — Virginia Tech: April 16, 2007)

A sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Blacksburg, Virginia), April 22, 2007, by the Rev. Don Robert Johnson, a former Methodist minister, a former college chaplain, and Leader Emeritus of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Rev Johnson will be in the pulpit twice a month during Rev. Brownlie’s sabbatical. Others from outside the Congregation who participated in the service were Rev. Karen Day and Ms. Nancy Combs-Morgan.

Readings

Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones bruise at even too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten—every piece of fruit—had been picked by callused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone’s knees, someone’s aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why had no one told her about this before?

Alison Luterman, “What We Came For”

One Sunday afternoon I heard him crying in the bedroom. I didn’t know what to do with a father who cried. He had taught me all I knew, the important things, honesty, loyalty, firm handshake, the love beyond self-love, the duty of a man. Trust was his only religion and it was failing him and in turn it was the failure of the world. The one thing a human being asks for on this earth is to be loved. Why should it be impossible?

Poe Ballantine, “The Empty House of My Brokenhearted Father”

Sympathy is hard to describe. It’s a feeling that something bad has happened to someone and you share it.

Italian American salesman in his thirties

It’s not really sympathy if you hear that someone has car trouble and you just say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ You have to follow through by offering that person a ride. Then it’s sympathy.

-Irish American typist in her fifties

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place... it’s a freak show. People forget how vulnerable they are despite their shirts and shoes and briefcases, how this hungry and cruel world could strip them, put them in the same position…

Where humans were concerned, the only emotion that made sense was wonder, at their ability to endure; and sorrow, for the hopelessness of it all.

You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Sermon

I had found this poem very helpful for me in the death of those closest to me: my father, mother and sister. And  a member of the Congregation had sent it to me the day of the VT massacre, mentioning to me how it has been helpful to him as well when his mother died.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew.
A formula, a phrase remains, — but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled.
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dirge without Music

Lines from my favorite movie: “ANTONIA’S LINE”

THE PROVERB IS WRONG
TIME DOES NOT HEAL ALL WOUNDS.
IT MERELY SOFTENS THE PAINS,
AND BLURS THE MEMORIES.

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

Stanley Kunitz

The poet William Stafford wrote that

There may be losses too great to understand that rove after you, and faint and terrible, rip unknown through your heart.

I believe these words are an accurate portrayal of pain and suffering, of their intensity and longevity. The deep wounds and devastating anguish of people’s suffering becomes manifest to all those who live life fully and intertwine their own life within the lives of others.

As the Psalmist said:

Suffering is never far away

(38:17).

All grief is individual. There is no pattern for how to grieve, no timetable to follow, no guide to proper feelings. While no one here needs to be told about suffering, there are some defining characteristics of suffering at it’s worst: to suffer alone, to suffer in silence even when not alone, to feel powerless in the suffering, or the agony of sensing no meaning in the suffering.

The great Anglican theologian John Baillie, in one of his prayers, asks that

when we face the valley of the shadow of death, may we not believe we know a better way around.

When suffering reduces us to silence, it is in finally being able to express and give lament to the hurt that leads us back from the lonely anguish, and beyond even that to shaping a response to the grief.

There are no experts on grief! I remember when I was younger that I naively thought after losing a loved one I would be able to handle future deaths easier. But to the contrary, I have found each death and tragedy resurrect all the past ones to grieve over again. Hence, a Vetnam veteran says this tragic event here this week drew him back into the sense of guilt he felt for having survived others in the war.

Katherine Mansfield wrote

There is no limit to human suffering. when one thinks ‘Now I have touched the bottom of the sea, now I can go no deeper”, one goes deeper.

Almost forty years ago, in my first pastorate, a very popular 14 year-old boy from a poor family went drinking on Valentine’s day with another young man. On their way home late that icy February night their car slid off the road into frozen waters. Badly injured, they could not move and froze to death. When I went to the family’s home I could only sit in silence with them, unable to find any human vocabulary that seemed adequate for the grief they knew and the unbearable feelings I too was experiencing.

Another minister, a fundamentalist, came to see them, immediately explained to the younger and older siblings that this was God’s way of teaching them a lesson — to be good young men. As quickly as he had mouthed these words he was gone. We continued to sit in silence. Sometimes that is all one can do.

Hemingway said

the world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.

What do we do in the face of other’s suffering? In such misery we bring our varied feelingsand inadequate attempts at help. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that true sympathy demands “the giving of one’s soul.” Sympathy reinforces and creates social bonds. There are many ways to sympathize, but we can identify at least three positive components in the sympathy-giving process:

Emily Dickinson writes:

Unto a broken heart
No other one may go
Without the high prerogative
Itself hath suffered too!

Elie Weisel, who has deeply suffered in life, believes

only the person with a broken heart can be a whole person.

Empathy and compassion are grounded in a sense of equality of persons, in a sense that “when one of us is cut, we all bleed.” We are dealing here with both the uniqueness of suffering, yet also the universality of suffering. In compassion we make others’ misery our own and so in relieving them we relieve ourselves, having experienced as well renewal through consolation and love.

The ancient Greek words used for these terms (empathy and compassion) come from a root word meaning sacrifice, literally “to eat one’s own heart.” The whole person, in respect of the depth and force in feeling unbearable sorrow, feels in the inward parts. The meaning derives from the center of comprehensive personal feeling and sensibility. In such compassion we are affected like another by the same sufferings and suffer alongside, a fellow feeling resulting from full acquaintance with life’s suffering. It is this Greek term that is always used to describe the sympathetic characteristics of the divine nature and is used in the parable of the Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son and many more.

But at it’s best compassion results in action, not just feeling. What value has compassion that does not take its object of feeling into its arms?

Worse than idle is compassion if it ends in tears and sighs.

Wordsworth

True compassion is the basic, essential and decisive attitude behind human acts of caring. The spiritual practice of deep listening is also essential to the growth and vibrancy of compassion and care.

We learned painfully this week of the innocent victims, devoted lives, gentle care and the heroic acts of those who we now remember. So much of life just happens, determined by circumstances beyond our control. What we can do is to learn that life has purpose when we give it meaning, that courage seems written into the nature of things when we decide to be brave, and love exists when we choose to care.

And to inculcate habits and foresight for the tragic times is our common task, as Julie Kasdorf tells in What I Learned from my Mother:

I learned from my mother how to love the living,

to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn,
black ants still stuck to the buds.
I learned to save jars large enough
to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household,
to cube home-canned pears and peaches,
to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings
even if I didn’t know the deceased
to press the moist hands of the living,
to look in their eyes and offer sympathy,
as though I understood loss, even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing;
what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially, like an angel.
Like a a doctor I learned to create from
another’s suffering my own usefulness.

And once you know how to do this you can never refuse.
To every house you enter you must offer healing.
A chocolate cake you baked yourself.
The blessing of your voice,
Your chaste touch.

As Leo Buscaglia has said:

The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.

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