When one person suffers, we all suffer

October 23, 2005 -- 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

By Bishop Robert Morneau

	Bishop Robert Morneau
	Questions for reflection: 1. What weight do you give to compassion in your spirituality? 2. How do love and compassion differ? How are they the same? 3. What is the most compassionate thing you have ever done?

Hurricane Katrina continues to impact the lives of millions of people. That is true not only of the "victims" of the storms, but also of the millions of people who responded and continue to respond to the needs of countless people. Like the tsunami, the world-wide community identified with the suffering and responded with compassion.

The message from the book of Exodus is clear and explicit: no molesting or oppressing the alien or anyone else; assist the poor and needy; no extortion! Failure here means the wrath of a compassionate God.

Compassion is at the heart of God and of the Gospel. In a famous meditation, the preacher/poet John Donne wrote: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Here is a deep insight into the virtue of compassion. We are a part of the whole. For Christians, we are all part of the Mystical Body of Christ and when one suffers, we all do, when someone rejoices, it affects us all. The people who died in Katrina were part of our family; the homes and churches destroyed, part of our possession. This sense of commonality has been lost in an age of individualism and autonomy. We need God's word (and poets like John Donne) to remind us time and time again of our unity.

In St. Paul's letter we see the people of Thessalonia interacting with the people of Macedonia and Achaia. St. Paul was about the divine business of building community and having communities share what had been given them, their faith as well as material goods. Again it is the underlying virtue of compassion that motivates so much of Paul's ministry. Paul felt deeply the hungers of the heart and the longing for faith. He responded by dedicating his life to the good news of the Gospel, to a compassionate, loving God made manifest in Jesus.

Love and compassion are not identical but they cannot be separated in action. The great commandment is love: love of God, one's neighbor, and oneself. But that love will not happen unless we have a compassionate heart, the heart of Jesus. A character in George Eliot's Adam Bede captures well this relationship between love and compassion: "For it seems to me it's the same with love and happiness as with sorrow - the more we know of it the better we can feel what other people's lives are or might be, and so we shall only be more tender to 'em, and wishful to help 'em" (480).

Here are some random thoughts on compassion: "The philosopher endures his neighbor's toothache patiently, but each knows where his own shoe pinches" (MacEoin). "It is an old saying: see the bear in his own den before you judge of his conditions" (C. S. Lewis). "Compassion makes love equal for everyone" (Simone Weil). "Beneath the bleeding hands we feel, / The sharp compassion of the healer's art" (T. S. Eliot).

Our Gospel exclamation deserves serious prayer and reflection: "If anyone loves me, he will hold to my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him."

(Bp. Morneau is the auxiliary bishop of the Green Bay Diocese and pastor of Resurrection Parish in Allouez.)