A Compassionate Life
Religious scholar Karen Armstrong has studied the teachings of religions large and small all around the world. And she has, as we all have, witnessed the strife in our world: the pain, the isolation, the injustice, the inequality.
And yet, she realized, no religion teaches that those things are acceptable. All of the world’s religions, in fact, teach compassion. They use different words and different concepts to talk about it, but all of them teach their followers to treat other people with kindness and respect. All of them teach their followers that moral, good people help others.
In her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, Armstrong asks us first to learn about compassion. What do the religions of the world say about it? What have we been taught about compassion—from our heritage, from our families, from our experiences? And most importantly, what does Unitarian Universalism teach about compassion?
We’ve got a principle about it, certainly. We covenant to affirm and promote, among other things, “justice, equity and compassion in human relationships.” And yet, how often does our practice of this principle stop with promoting justice?
What does it mean to promote compassion in human relationships?
How would our society be different if we made it the norm that we try to feel one another’s pain—that we suffer with one another instead of watching one another suffer. Justice and equity only require the latter—it’s compassion that requires the with.
Our Universalist heritage also encourages us to compassion. The promise of universal salvation, at its most basic, is that all of us are going to end up in the same place when we die (we can disagree about where and what that place is). I don’t think of heaven as a realm for the soul that is outside of what we know—I think of it as right here, in the midst of the world that we know.
Your being, mine, and everyone’s—all part of one, interconnected, closed system. I am regularly stopped in my tracks by the unfathomable beauty of this notion that we are inextricably bound to one another. The promise of our connectedness requires us to realize our unity with all of creation.
In his 1945 work A Religion For Greatness, Universalist minister and theologian Clarence Skinner emphasized our religious call to work toward the unity of all beings, which he defined as “the coherence of what may seem to be separate, into a oneness. Unity,” he wrote, “means an operative harmony, a functional relationship which belongs to all the parts of a whole.”
Later in this work, Skinner also wrote, “This great religious experience of the unities and the universals, however, tends to direct [humanity] outward toward what is greater than the atomistic human.”
Clarence Skinner pushed to expand the notion of Universalism that his spiritual ancestors had developed. He called us to a “cosmic mind-set” in which we all realized our connection with—indeed our unity with—everything that is, everything that has been, and everything that ever will be.
We are one with the stars. With the planets. With the oceans and mountains and ice caps. With the forests and the deserts and the fauna running through them. We are also one with one another.
This unity of existence has profound implications for how we live.
This unity of existence calls us to suffer with those who suffer, because we are they and they are we.
This unity of existence calls us to practice compassion. Our faith teaches us we must.
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