I just finished reading this wonderful book, Tattoos on the Heart, a collection of stories and insights from a Jesuit priest who runs a gang intervention program in the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. This is book that gets to the core of compassion and unconditional love. This is a book whose wisdom goes far beyond the streets of LA and can easily be applied to our interactions with others across the globe. Throughout the book, the author, Gregory Boyle, keeps coming back to two major themes:
- Above all else, humans share the need to be loved and valued and to feel that they matter.
- We must have compassion, or loving kindness, for our fellow humans and it must be “a covenant between equals”.
First and foremost is the human need to love and be loved. We need to feel valued, like our life here on Earth means something. When this is missing, when we feel a lack of self-worth, is when we begin to stop caring about our lives and the lives of those around us, and begin to make bad choices. Father Boyle relays numerous stories in his book about the men and women who have come through his program. Almost all have done some pretty awful things, and almost all have come from really tumultuous backgrounds fraught with unspeakable tragedy. These are not bad people, just people born from bad circumstances. But, when shown some love and compassion and given a job that gives them purpose, they begin to see they matter. They begin to value their lives and the lives of others. And, they begin to change.
Compassion is understanding this basic human need and viewing the struggles of others through it’s lens. Compassion is defined as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it;” but, coming to the second point, you cannot have true compassion as long as there is a divide between “us” and “them.” Only when there is kinship between two individuals or groups, a human connection based on the understanding that there is not one soul on this planet that deserves better than another, can there be true compassion. Many of us claim to be compassionate, yet still see ourselves separate from the “other”- the homeless man on the street or the convict locked up in prison. We see ourselves as righteous and virtuous when helping these less fortunates. The problem is “helping” implies weakness and immediately establishes a power discrepancy between the helpers and those being helped. On the other hand, when we acknowledge the common kinship between all humans, our “helping” becomes a reverential act of service- one person, or group, giving of themselves to the restoration of balance for all. The distinction is subtle, but important.
A dear friend of mine confided in me her story of unexpected compassion: As a very small girl, she was molested by a babysitter, and, as a result, struggled throughout adolescence and adulthood with self-esteem, body image and intimacy. As she continued to work through her trauma much later in her life, she had a conversation with her mother that changed everything. Her mother referred to the perpetrator as the babysitter’s 12-year old son, a detail that my friend had forgotten in the blur of childhood trauma. She described this moment of discovery to me as an “Oh My God”, heart-wrenching moment. She felt an immediate kinship with her abuser, wondering what abuse this boy must have experienced himself to have committed such an atrocious act at such a young age. As Father Boyle writes, “bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.” Her anger and hurt turned almost immediately to compassion and forgiveness. She wasn’t excusing his behavior, but rather, got a glimpse into their shared suffering. This is a hard, hard thing to do– finding compassion for those who have hurt or betrayed you. But as Father Boyle suggests, “Isn’t the highest honing of compassion that which is hospitable to victim and victimizer both, ” finding what joins and connects people instead of separates them?
As I made my way through the book and began to process it’s deeper meaning, I couldn’t help but make parallels between his work and current national events, namely the all-too-common mass shootings that have rocked the country in the past few years. Putting the issue of guns aside for a moment, there seems to be another common thread among the events. Most, or all, of the perpetrators were socially isolated and outcast from their peers. What if, as we begin to search for a solution to this national epidemic, we take a hard look at what joins these shooters? These “monsters” entered the world the same way we did, innocent and full of potential, but somewhere something went terribly wrong. Coming back to the first theme, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “the people who go around becoming bullies are people who have a massive sense of insecurity, who want to prove that they are somebody, often because they did not get enough love” (from The Book of Joy). So, maybe part of the solution to all the violence is to go way back, back to where it all began. Maybe we need to fight violence with compassion. Maybe we need to recognize those who are hurting and offer loving kindness as a path to self-worth. That boy who no one notices sitting all alone in the lunch room, what if someone showed him he mattered by sitting with him at the table? What if we invited the “awkward” kids to our parties, not as an act of benevolent righteousness, but because they are human beings deserving of respect and love? I understand that the issue is complex and complicated, but I think we underestimate just how powerful the need to be loved is, and how much good a little compassion can do.
As Mother Theresa said,”If you want to change the world, go home and love your family; [however], the problem with our world is that we draw the circle of family too small.”
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