When we hold another’s hardship deep in our hearts, we send out a “prayer” for happiness and healing, light and love.

Part 6: A Call to Compassion

The enemy of joy is not suffering. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructed his listeners that happiness belongs to the poor in spirit, to the gentle, to those who mourn, to those who hunger and thirst for what is right, to the merciful, to the pure in heart, to the peacemakers, and to those who are persecuted in the cause of right. Unhappiness reflects our inability to hold personal hardships and the burdens of others in our heart. Through an intimate embrace of our poverty, we become attuned to the tears and toils of all humanity. If we attempt to flee from the impoverished aspects of life and from personal pain we will lack empathy for the suffering of others.

For two years I kept company with the homeless in the inner city of Montreal. At that time I was negotiating the terrain of mid-life; these men enabled me to be present to my own woundedness and negotiate my own shadow self. Certainly, to be with those whose afflictions are greater than your own heals ingratitude. I have always felt inspired by the word of the prophet Isaiah as he writes of the Lord’s call to compassion, with its promise of light and healing:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then shall you light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily…
{Isaiah 58.6-8. Revised Standard Version}

Tonglen is a Buddhist meditative practice, a practice of mindfulness that enables on to take on the mental and physical suffering of others, and to bestow on them one’s own well-being. In a sense, it is a spiritual exchange of peace for pain, imagining the other person as exactly the same as you. When we hold another’s hardship deep in our hearts, we send out a “prayer” for happiness and healing, light and love. The Tonglen practice aims to cultivate a spiritual capacity to give our own happiness away in exchange for the suffering of others. Tonglen is opposite to the more typical reaction of a well-meaning friend, who said to me at the time of my river accident, “Man, I’m glad I’m not you!”

Another Buddhist term is Bodhisattva, which refers to an individual who voluntarily participates in suffering, and thereby endeavors to bring joy to a sorrowful world. Beyond sympathy, it is the practical determination to do whatever we can to help alleviate the suffering of others. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying exhorts us to such compassion

…when experiencing a sight that can open the eyes of your heart to the fact of vast suffering in the world. Let it. Don’t wasted the love and grief it arouses; in the moment you feel compassion welling up in you, don’t brush it aside, don’t shrug it off and try quickly to return to ‘normal’, don’t be afraid of your feeling or embarrassed by it, or allow yourself to be distracted from it or let it run aground in apathy. Be vulnerable: use that quick, bright uprush of compassion; focus on it, go deep into your heart and meditate on it, develop it, enhance, and deepen it. But doing this you will realize how blind you have been to suffering, how the pain you are experiencing or seeing now is only a tiny fraction of the pain of the world. All beings everywhere suffer; let your heart go out to them all. (1)

See also:
Part 1: A Wounded Riverman
Part 2: Be in Love
Part 3:  Law of Generosity
Part 4: The Degenerative Ego
Part 5:  The Wounded Healer
Last in the series: Making the Difference