Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with compassion

We're here to celebrate compassion.

But compassion, from my vantage point,

has a problem.

As essential as it is across our traditions,

as real as so many of us know it to be

in particular lives,

the word "compassion" is hollowed out in our culture,

and it is suspect in my field of journalism.

It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing,

or it's seen as potentially depressing.

Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story

of giving a speech in Holland

and, after the fact, the word "compassion"

was translated as "pity."

Now compassion, when it enters the news,

too often comes in the form

of feel-good feature pieces

or sidebars about heroic people

you could never be like

or happy endings

or examples of self-sacrifice

that would seem to be too good to be true

most of the time.

Our cultural imagination about compassion

has been deadened by idealistic images.

And so what I'd like to do this morning

for the next few minutes

is perform a linguistic resurrection.

And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise

that words matter,

that they shape the way we understand ourselves,

the way we interpret the world

and the way we treat others.

When this country

first encountered genuine diversity

in the 1960s,

we adopted tolerance

as the core civic virtue

with which we would approach that.

Now the word "tolerance," if you look at it in the dictionary,

connotes "allowing," "indulging"

and "enduring."

In the medical context that it comes from,

it is about testing the limits of thriving

in an unfavorable environment.

Tolerance is not really a lived virtue;

it's more of a cerebral ascent.

And it's too cerebral

to animate guts and hearts

and behavior

when the going gets rough.

And the going is pretty rough right now.

I think that without perhaps being able to name it,

we are collectively experiencing

that we've come as far as we can

with tolerance as our only guiding virtue.

Compassion is a worthy successor.

It is organic,

across our religious, spiritual and ethical traditions,

and yet it transcends them.

Compassion is a piece of vocabulary

that could change us if we truly let it sink into

the standards to which we hold ourselves and others,

both in our private and in our civic spaces.

So what is it, three-dimensionally?

What are its kindred and component parts?

What's in its universe of attendant virtues?

To start simply,

I want to say that compassion is kind.

Now "kindness" might sound like a very mild word,

and it's prone to its own abundant cliche.

But kindness is an everyday byproduct

of all the great virtues.

And it is a most edifying form

of instant gratification.

Compassion is also curious.

Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity.

I love a phrase that was offered me

by two young women

who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles,

Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi.

They are working to create a new imagination

about shared life among young Jews and Muslims,

and as they do that, they cultivate what they call

"curiosity without assumptions."

Well that's going to be a breeding ground for compassion.

Compassion can be synonymous with empathy.

It can be joined with the harder work

of forgiveness and reconciliation,

but it can also express itself

in the simple act of presence.

It's linked to practical virtues

like generosity and hospitality

and just being there,

just showing up.

I think that compassion

also is often linked to beauty --

and by that I mean a willingness

to see beauty in the other,

not just what it is about them

that might need helping.

I love it that my Muslim conversation partners

often speak of beauty as a core moral value.

And in that light, for the religious,

compassion also brings us

into the territory of mystery --

encouraging us not just

to see beauty,

but perhaps also to look for the face of God

in the moment of suffering,

in the face of a stranger,

in the face of the vibrant religious other.

I'm not sure if I can show you

what tolerance looks like,

but I can show you what compassion looks like --

because it is visible.

When we see it, we recognize it

and it changes the way we think about what is doable,

what is possible.

It is so important

when we're communicating big ideas --

but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion --

to root it as we present it to others

in space and time and flesh and blood --

the color and complexity of life.

And compassion does seek physicality.

I first started to learn this most vividly

from Matthew Sanford.

And I don't imagine that you will realize this

when you look at this photograph of him,

but he's paraplegic.

He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13,

in a car crash that killed his father and his sister.

Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again,

and -- and he does experience this as an "and"

rather than a "but" --

and he experiences himself

to be healed and whole.

And as a teacher of yoga,

he brings that experience to others

across the spectrum of ability and disability,

health, illness and aging.

He says that he's just at an extreme end

of the spectrum we're all on.

He's doing some amazing work now

with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Matthew has made this remarkable observation

that I'm just going to offer you and let it sit.

I can't quite explain it, and he can't either.

But he says that he has yet to experience someone

who became more aware of their body,

in all its frailty and its grace,

without, at the same time,

becoming more compassionate towards all of life.

Compassion also looks like this.

This is Jean Vanier.

Jean Vanier helped found the L'Arche communities,

which you can now find all over the world,

communities centered around life

with people with mental disabilities --

mostly Down syndrome.

The communities that Jean Vanier founded,

like Jean Vanier himself,

exude tenderness.

"Tender" is another word

I would love to spend some time resurrecting.

We spend so much time in this culture

being driven and aggressive,

and I spend a lot of time being those things too.

And compassion can also have those qualities.

But again and again, lived compassion

brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness.

Jean Vanier says

that his work,

like the work of other people --

his great, beloved, late friend Mother Teresa --

is never in the first instance about changing the world;

it's in the first instance about changing ourselves.

He's says that what they do with L'Arche

is not a solution, but a sign.

Compassion is rarely a solution,

but it is always a sign of a deeper reality,

of deeper human possibilities.

And compassion is unleashed

in wider and wider circles

by signs and stories,

never by statistics and strategies.

We need those things too,

but we're also bumping up against their limits.

And at the same time that we are doing that,

I think we are rediscovering the power of story --

that as human beings, we need stories

to survive, to flourish,

to change.

Our traditions have always known this,

and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart

and carried them forward in time for us.

There is, of course, a story

behind the key moral longing

and commandment of Judaism

to repair the world -- tikkun olam.

And I'll never forget hearing that story

from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen,

who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her,

that in the beginning of the Creation

something happened

and the original light of the universe

was shattered into countless pieces.

It lodged as shards

inside every aspect of the Creation.

And that the highest human calling

is to look for this light, to point at it when we see it,

to gather it up,

and in so doing, to repair the world.

Now this might sound like a fanciful tale.

Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way.

Rachel Naomi Remen says

this is an important and empowering story

for our time,

because this story insists

that each and every one of us,

frail and flawed as we may be,

inadequate as we may feel,

has exactly what's needed

to help repair the part of the world

that we can see and touch.

Stories like this,

signs like this,

are practical tools

in a world longing to bring compassion

to abundant images of suffering

that can otherwise overwhelm us.

Rachel Naomi Remen

is actually bringing compassion

back to its rightful place alongside science

in her field of medicine

in the training of new doctors.

And this trend

of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing,

how these kinds of virtues

are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine --

the work Fred Luskin is doing --

I think this is one of the most fascinating developments

of the 21st century --

that science, in fact,

is taking a virtue like compassion

definitively out of the realm of idealism.

This is going to change science, I believe,

and it will change religion.

But here's a face

from 20th century science

that might surprise you

in a discussion about compassion.

We all know about the Albert Einstein

who came up with E = mc2.

We don't hear so much about the Einstein

who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson,

to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton

because the best hotel there

was segregated and wouldn't have her.

We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity

to advocate for political prisoners in Europe

or the Scottsboro boys

in the American South.

Einstein believed deeply

that science should transcend

national and ethnic divisions.

But he watched physicists and chemists

become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction

in the early 20th century.

He once said that science in his generation

had become like a razor blade

in the hands of a three-year-old.

And Einstein foresaw

that as we grow more modern

and technologically advanced,

we need the virtues

our traditions carry forward in time

more, not less.

He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages.

Some of his favorites were Moses,

Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi,

Gandhi -- he adored his contemporary, Gandhi.

And Einstein said --

and I think this is a quote,

again, that has not been passed down in his legacy --

that "these kinds of people

are geniuses in the art of living,

more necessary

to the dignity, security and joy of humanity

than the discoverers of objective knowledge."

Now invoking Einstein

might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth

and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us,

but actually it is.

I want to show you

the rest of this photograph,

because this photograph

is analogous to what we do to the word "compassion" in our culture --

we clean it up

and we diminish its depths and its grounding

in life, which is messy.

So in this photograph

you see a mind looking out a window

at what might be a cathedral -- it's not.

This is the full photograph,

and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket,

smoking a cigar.

And by the look of that paunch,

he hasn't been doing enough yoga.

We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website,

and someone said, "When I look at the first photo,

I ask myself, what was he thinking?

And when I look at the second, I ask,

what kind of person was he? What kind of man is this?"

Well, he was complicated.

He was incredibly compassionate

in some of his relationships

and terribly inadequate in others.

And it is much harder, often,

to be compassionate towards those closest to us,

which is another quality in the universe of compassion,

on its dark side,

that also deserves our serious attention and illumination.

Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being.

So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Dorothy Day.

So was Mother Teresa.

So are we all.

And I want to say

that it is a liberating thing

to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion --

following on what Fred Luskin says --

that these flaws just make us human.

Our culture is obsessed with perfection

and with hiding problems.

But what a liberating thing to realize

that our problems, in fact,

are probably our richest sources

for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion,

towards bringing compassion

towards the suffering and joys of others.

Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor

because of her life-long struggle with Crohn's disease.

Einstein became a humanitarian,

not because of his exquisite knowledge

of space and time and matter,

but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist.

And Karen Armstrong, I think you would also say

that it was some of your very wounding experiences

in a religious life that,

with a zigzag,

have led to the Charter for Compassion.

Compassion can't be reduced to sainthood

any more than it can be reduced to pity.

So I want to propose

a final definition of compassion --

this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way --

and that would be for us

to call compassion a spiritual technology.

Now our traditions contain

vast wisdom about this,

and we need them to mine it for us now.

But compassion is also equally at home

in the secular as in the religious.

So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing

and say that humanity,

the future of humanity,

needs this technology

as much as it needs all the others

that have now connected us

and set before us

the terrifying and wondrous possibility

of actually becoming one human race.

Thank you.

(Applause)