Compassion: Lead With It
I've recently finished a couple of novels set in post-soviet Eastern Europe, one in Estonia and one in Bulgaria. This was a time of extreme uncertainty and polarized politics. The socialists hated the fascists and the fascists despised communist extremists. One side would grab power. They would keep power by placing the other side in "rehabilitation camps" (i.e., concentration camps). The pain of the era soaks through the pages like spilled ink.
I look at our day, and the genesis of the same pains are reoccurring. Those who deny history are doomed to repeat it.
I sit on a Sunday morning in the middle of a politicized pandemic.
How do we live with compassion?
That's my biggest question.
I think of Buechner's words.
“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ”
I have work to do.
We all have work to do.
Pundits and politicians are leading us to an abyss for the sake of personal power. The revolution isn't an abyss on the opposite side. The revolution is seeing (and treating) people as humans.
The revolution is compassion.
