Compassion – 24 August 2012

One of the most striking features of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was their considerable reluctance to sit in judgment on others.  Squarely in front of any need for judgment they saw a prior need for understanding and compassion.  Numerous stories of these people illustrate this.  They said judging is perilous to the one doing the judging.  They saw that when we do judge others, it is inclined to be an expression of our own woundedness.--- -

So what are we going to think about a person who is, so far as I know, beyond moral redemption – reaching for words we find, for instance, recalcitrant, or the old ecclesiastical word, contumacious -- someone who is indeed refusing moral help, who does not acknowledge guilt, who is placing himself beyond normal civilised moral codes?  Another old-fashioned word for that is reprobate.  The word means not approved, rejected entirely from favour.  In Christian theology there have always been some who thought that God reprobates certain people anyway.  They are then beyond redemption, outside the pale, cast into the abyss.  This may be because of what they have done, or not done – or it may be, as Calvin thought, entirely the sovereign and inscrutable choice of God.  Robert Burns pillories all this in his poem, Holy Willie’s Prayer.  I think any Christian believer would need to work hard to believe that stuff today.  But  now, it’s at least interesting to me that whole chunks of secular society seem eager to believe it.  You may be reprobate and we don’t want you anywhere near our town.  You should be cast out, as the lepers were driven outside the city walls in ancient times.  It was not only the fear of contagion from them, but also the assumption that God had shown his rejection of them by their visible disease.  So we don’t now care about you or what happens to you.  You are outcast.

So society becomes very ugly.  People come to be motivated by their fear.  No one has any actual solutions, simply because the problem is intractable.   It is without any satisfactory and safe solution.  People then start to say silly things.  They threaten vigilante action.  They demonise their fears by media-labels such as Beast.  Mob psychology and hysteria start to emerge. 

Contemplative prayer and life teach me that nothing whatever is gained by fear and anger.  It also teaches me to be very wary of self-righteousness.  These things are what the ego grasps at.  That the other person may be intractably wicked does not mean that I am in any position to climb on to the moral high ground and give interviews to the media.  Jesus reminds me that I am unable conscientiously to throw the first stone.  The only one who could – Jesus himself presumably – quietly refuses to.  And indeed, in Jesus’s company I can’t remotely imagine myself ever doing so.  Contemplatives know there are always various circumstances in life which are without solution, and that danger in a human and social sense is always present somewhere.  If we want to be safe in human terms we are out of luck.  But in the company of Jesus and in the silence and stillness, we are learning another way.