Compassion

For months I struggled to define compassion. My initial thought was that compassion is proactive love, that is, a cause...Something we give someone to relieve their suffering. I knew I had erred. Love cannot be both a cause and an effect. I was sure love is a feeling, an effect, not a cause: It is my response to some other who shares the values I cherish.

Compassion, it seemed to me is a very different thing. Unlike love, compassion is something I feel for nameless strangers. And I feel it intensely and often…Me? Crying real tears for a couple weeping on television, begging for the safe return of their missing child; for the father in Kabul crying over the corpse of his wife; for the American G.I. holding a wounded Iraqi child in his arms, comforting her; for the family picking through the rubble of what was their home before the storm; for child cancer patients in their beds.

My “heart goes out” to these people. They’re all strangers. They’re all people I do not know and will likely never know. So, why am I crying? Is some remnant of my Christian upbringing in play here? Is my compassion for these people an expression of love? Is my compassion causing these tears?

I stumbled over the answer one afternoon walking into the Fuzzy Duck liquor store. There, lying on the sidewalk a few yards from the door was a filthy, homeless man looking pathetic, a bagged bottle between his legs. Here was human misery in the flesh and I felt nothing.

Do I have a duty to be compassionate?

As I drove home I began to list examples of human suffering I had witnessed either live or on television. I realized immediately I was placing each experience in one of two columns. One column was for the strangers who were suffering through no fault of their own; the other was for the people who had created their own miserable circumstances. My heart did not go out to the latter.

I do not feel compassion for the crack addict lying in the gutter, the slacker who deliberately fails my class, the gossip and liar who has no friends, the mother of the dead suicide bomber.

When I see good people suffering through no fault of their own…a cancer diagnosis, a natural disaster, etc. the result is my compassion. I feel for these people and to some extent I share their suffering. I’m quite helpless to stop these feelings from coming on when I have good reason. Nor can I feel them without good reason. Like love, I discovered, compassion is an effect, not a cause.

Finally, it was possible to conclude:

No man has a moral obligation to be compassionate. If choice is removed from the equation so too is morality.

No man has a right to my compassion. It is my choice—to do or not to do. If choice is removed from the equation, so too is compassion.