When I was a kid, I remember a short story I read about two people, a man and a woman, who could read minds. For the life of me I can’t recall the name of it or find it anywhere, but what you’d think was a blessing was for them a sore trial. They couldn’t get away from the noise of other people’s random thoughts. One of them, the man, who was the narrator of the story, was riding a bus, and was rattled on all sides from what this person was thinking or that person, burdened with their sorrows, annoyed by their follies, distracted by their confusions, bored to death by their impertinence and self-regard. I remember that the speaker felt intensely lonely. Imagine that — you’re in touch with everyone’s thoughts whether you like them or not, and that very fact isolates you, since you dare not draw near to anyone, not least because there’s nobody who can begin to understand your experience. And then, suddenly — in some public place, maybe on the bus, though I can’t remember — his mind reaches forth and he finds another person with the same faculty, a woman. And for two or three minutes each one bursts out in expressions of feeling, right from the heart, two lonely people, revealing themselves to the other; but that’s all they can stand, and they part in exasperation and a loneliness more profound than ever.
Here’s a miracle nothing less than divine: God knows our inmost thoughts, and he loves us still. He does more than know our thoughts. He has compassion on us. I won’t here get into the subject of God’s impassibility, except to say that whatever we enjoy, whatever power we have, God possesses in supereminence, and that includes our ability to move in love at the sight of someone in need of that love. We call it compassion, our Word of the Week, because it implies a suffering-with: as when Jesus groaned, hearing Mary of Bethany say, “Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died.” The mind-readers in the story I’ve described were, we might say, super-sensitive, but not compassionate, because they disliked what they felt. Imagine if every time you passed somebody with a headache, your own head pounded. Imagine that you can’t go to a restaurant, because you’ll feel this person’s heartburn and that person’s sensitive tooth and the other person’s canker sore: you would feel what they feel, you would suffer what they suffer, but you would not be suffering with them. Two thieves suffered alongside Jesus, but only one thief suffered with him.
We suppose that compassion will always predispose us toward someone, and I guess that’s right, according to our use of the word, though sometimes, I dare say, the more you know about someone’s true feelings rather than what he or she says about them, the less you will want to hang around, much less to offer your assistance. If we’re to believe the old fables, crocodiles also weep. But most of the time, anyway, it’s enough just to see that someone is suffering, and not to inquire too closely into the tangle of causes. The compassion that the superior person feels for the inferior may be called pity, and that too requires real tact, if we’re to pity without making the recipient of our pity feel low or mean or contemptible, or without weakening him. I had a good friend who refused to let his son enter his house until he promised that he would get himself into a drug rehab program. The boy camped out in the backyard, and when one day my friend found that his car was gone, in all deliberate calmness he called the police and had his son picked up. I am certain that my friend felt compassion for his son, and that was why he permitted himself to appear callous and heartless, when he really was quite the opposite. Sure, most people who appear callous are so; most, but not all. His son did turn his life around. He told me so, at the reception after his father’s funeral. Of the three children, I think he was the most broken up.
The word compassion, from the Latin passio — passion, suffering — is a nice doublet of Greek sympatheia, which means exactly the same thing, and, after meandering through late Latin and medieval French, enters English as sympathy. There’s not a hair’s difference between them, unless it’s that we consider compassion as something active, and sympathy as something passive: as for example the sympathetic vibration of one bell in response to another, if they’re of the same tone and you ring the one near the other. But the word in the New Testament that’s translated as compassion isn’t related to sympathy. It’s the completely different verb splanchnizomai — to be moved within the splanchna, the inward parts (in colloquial American, the innards), that is, the heart, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, the “bowels of compassion,” as the old phrase put it. The verb is in the middle voice, implying that the subject both performs and suffers the action.
Let me explain. In English, we distinguish only between the active voice and the passive voice. In the active, the subject performs the action: Superman stopped the train. In the passive, the subject suffers the action: The train was stopped by Superman. But many languages also distinguish the middle voice, partaking of both active and passive: The train stopped. The train doesn’t stop something else; it stops itself; it stops. So too the powerful movement of compassion: you perform it, yes, but it moves within you and you suffer the movement. It happens within yourself. Compassion is not supposed to take the place of justice. It isn’t sentimentality, which is often pretty hard-hearted. But it is good both for the giver and the receiver — and maybe better for the giver.
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