Singing Suddenly

We could be free                                                                                                                         If we only knew we were slaves to the pains of each other                                 One thing I believe, I could learn                                                                                      To see my enemy as my brother                                                                                   Then we could be free, truly…                                                                                                —Vic Mensa, partial lyrics to “We Could Be Free,” track 13 from The Autobiography (Roc Nation and Capitol Records, 2017)

In the previous post I highlighted compassion as “suffering with” someone, as when the Samaritan went to the robbery victim while others “passed by on the other side.” two other stories in Luke involve compassion as  “suffering with.” In the story of the father and two sons (aka “The Prodigal Son,” Luke 15.11-32) the father runs to his son while he is still far away. Similarly, in the episode involving the widow of Na’in (Luke, 7.11-17), Jesus, with compassion for the widow, goes forward and touches the funeral bier. In doing this he steps away from his status and contaminates himself by contact with a dead body and, however slightly, foreshadows his own death. Each of these stories, the only three uses of compassion in Luke, present compassion as “suffering with” another.

They speak also of new (or renewed) life. The robbers beat and robbed their victim, leaving him “half dead;” but, having compassion, the Samaritan tends to the robbery victim and makes arrangements for his recovery. In the story of the two sons, the father says, “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life.” In the story of the widow, her son is brought back to life and returned to her. Compassion, in Luke, always involves new or renewed life.

For those who seek a living witness of compassion, a current example of shared suffering from the entrails as the occasion for new life, let me recommend the life and writing of Gregory Boyle. He is the founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries. Homeboy Industries is the largest response, and alternative, to gang life in the world. More to the point, it is an alternative to extreme, callous indifference in the world.

In his bestselling Tattoos on the Heart, this Jesuit priest tells of travelling through a series of speaking engagements with two companions. Near the end of the journey they accepted an invitation to visit a ministry in Pritchard, Alabama:

Memo and Miguel* are positively bug-eyed as they walk around, meet people, and see a kind of poverty quite different than the one they know.

We return to the house where we’re staying and have half an hour to pack before leaving for the airport and our return home. We all dispatch to our rooms, and I throw my suitcase together. I look up, and Memo is standing in my doorway, crying. He is a very big man, had been a shot caller for his barrio, and has done things in and out of prison for which he feels great shame—harm as harm. The depth of his core wound is quite something to behold. Torture, unrivalled betrayal, chilling abandonment—there is little terror of which Memo would be unfamiliar.

He’s weeping as he stands in my doorway, and I ask him what’s happening.

“That visit to Pritchard—I don’t know, it got to me. I mean [and he’s crying a great deal here] how do we let people live like this?”

He pauses, then, “G, I don’t know what’s happening to me, but it’s big. It’s like, for the first time in my life, I feel, I don’t know, what’s the word…I feel compassion for what other people suffer.”

Outcast. Victim and victimizer. Sheep without a shepherd. Memo finds his core wound and joins it to the Pritchard core wound. Entrails, involving the bowels, the deepest place in Memo finds solidarity in the starkest wound of others. Compassion is God. The pain of others having a purchase on his life. Memo would return, with other homies, to Pritchard many times. A beloved community of equals has been fostered and forged there….Soon enough, there won’t be anyone left outside. (Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, New York: Free Press, 2010) 81,82

*Most names in the book have been changed.

A lawyer in Luke’s gospel uses this question to “justify” himself, and to trap Jesus in a debate over the laws about the extent of one’s obligations. Who is my neighbor? The person next door, on the same street, in the same synagogue, the same town?

Jesus does not engage in the debate. Instead, he offers what has become one of the most popular of his parables: the parable of the Good Samaritan. I prefer to think of it as the parable of the Samaritan and the Robbery Victim.

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, `Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Luke10:30b-35 (emphasis mine)

In his Interpretation commentary, Luke, Fred Craddock says that “parable,” from the Greek, means “tossed alongside;” so, part of interpreting a parable is recognizing what things have been “tossed alongside” each other in an effort to help us understand them in a new way.

Jews and Samaritans were, for many strong and sound reasons, completely at odds with each other. So, to his listeners, the idea of the Samaritan as the “hero” of a story told by Jesus would have stretched the imagination, probably to the point of absurdity. To most of Jesus’ initial audience Samaritans were, in effect, nearby pretenders—the false ones at the door, made worse by their proximity. “Neighbors“ under the worst pretense.

Unlike the others who “passed by on the other side,” however, the Samaritan “had compassion” when he saw the robbery victim.

The Greek word translated as compassion here means more literally “to feel something in one’s entrails. Many translations render it “pity,” or “mercy” but, in English, to have pity on someone is to be moved while in a position of power, wealth, or health, while preserving the distance that position provides. To have “mercy” on someone is to have power over them and to decline to exercise it.  “Compassion,” meanwhile comes from the Latin, meaning “to suffer with” in such way as to overcome the distance of advantage, position, or power.

We know our neighbors and are able to love them, as they are, in a crucial sense, ourselves. So, loving our neighbors means, in part, having compassion, suffering with them. Our neighbors are those with whom we suffer. When we recognize the humanity of others, made obvious in their suffering, we can discover that humanity within ourselves. People become our neighbors when we share suffering. We become neighbors when we disclose to each other our shared humanity. Through shared suffering—through compassion—we belong to each other. The parable of the Samaritan and the Robbery Victim reminds us that shared suffering—compassion—offers even estranged enemies a way to love.

Every deep question in my life has turned on something about love. I thought very seriously about calling this blog “On the love of God and Neighbor,” but that seemed to suggest that I had already decided something I hoped to discover. I begin, instead, with a question: What is my witness?

In that light, I call attention to wisdom from a sage.

Brother David Steindl-Rast—a hermit of Mount Savior monastery, a master-guide in West-East conversation, and one of the genuine sages I have been blessed to hear—published a marvelous book in 1984, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness. In his, graceful presentation, he wrote two things about love that brought light to the darkness of my thinking. First: Setting aside the seriously limited notions of preferential desire and passionate attraction, Brother David reminded us that all our notions of love include some sense of belonging. (p164ff) He appealed, always, to our own experience. I find that belonging, especially as he presented it, is true to my experience of love, so I offer it to you.

Second: Brother David shed light on something else about love that has puzzled and troubled me for decades. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” This has been a bon mot, even a mantra for Christians and for many others for centuries.

I have poked and prodded this sentence/admonition/promise through years of preaching: Yes, It is a merger of two verses of biblical law…No, I do not think the joining was original to Jesus…Yes, in Luke’s gospel it is surrounded by material largely original to Luke…No, it is not original to Luke (If it predates Jesus it predates Luke’s gospel!)…Yes, it sounds like you must love yourself in order to love either God or neighbor….WAIT!

That way of proceeding leads down at least one of many alleys filled with as much shadow as light.

Brother David offered, in characteristically simple, graceful language, a word about “as yourself.” In a talk about life, he pointed to “as yourself” as a problematic translation. “As” does not translate a comparative term such as “like” or “similar to.” It translates, instead, a form of the verb to be. So, we have “love you neighbor (being) yourself.” (p169)  Or: “Love your neighbor who is yourself.”

I can imagine the gear grinding screeches in “individuals” such as myself. Fear not! Be at ease…

This is merely a beginning thought.

At the same time, it is a beginning.

A closing word especially for our times: “my neighbor who is myself” leads to wisdom about love of enemies. “We belong together. Whatever I do to you, I do it ultimately to myself.”(p168)

To those who enjoy the journey, especially if you would like a gentle, elegant way to come to the realization that we are not the noble, independent, self-reliant Invictus, I commend Brother David’s wonderful book.

Singing Suddenly is my new blog about the life of the heart and the spirit. It’s about loving God and neighbor. It’s about looking for ways to express what proves, without translation and reworking, inexpressible. It is a humble effort to “eff the ineffable.” It’s about attending to things that prove both elusive and crucial to life, especially if we are to enjoy a life of love and resist the absurdity and callous indifference of power.

In a prose note, “Concerning the Poet,” Rainer Maria Rilke described an experience which captured for him the life and work of poets. He described the crew of a becalmed sailing vessel as they took up oars and struggled against the tide. Then he gave his attention to someone else. “Now,“ he wrote,

I cannot postpone any longer mention of the man sitting at the front on the right-hand side of the boat. I ended by believing that I could feel in advance when his song was about to begin, but I may have been mistaken. He sang suddenly, at quite irregular intervals, and by no means always when exhaustion increased; on the contrary, his song occurred more than once when all of the rowers were vigorous or even, but even then it was the right thing; even then it was appropriate. I do not know to what extent the mood of our crew communicated itself to him; they were all behind him, he rarely looked backwards, and was not affected when he did so. What did seem to influence him was the pure movement of his feeling when it met the open distance, in which he was absorbed in a manner half melancholy, half resolute. In him the forward thrust of our vessel and the force opposed to us were continually held in counterpoise—from time to time a surplus accumulated: then he sang. The boat overcame the opposition; but what could not be overcome (was not susceptible of being overcome) he, the magician, transmuted into a series of long floating sounds, detached with the most immediate actuality and the overcoming of it, his voice maintained contact with the farthest distance, linking us with it until we felt its power of attraction.

(Where Silence Reigns “Concerning the Poet,” Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke, (New Directions Paperbook) Rainer Maria Rilke and G. Craig Houston) 66.

Perhaps Rilke’s insight about poets speaks as well for sojourners in the heart and spirit.

My name is John Griswold and for thirty-five years or so I have been a United Methodist pastor serving primarily in Florida. I look for simple words, ideas, and images to translate what we cannot translate, to point toward what we cannot see, to resound beyond our horizons. In spirit and heart, in God and neighbor, in love, I work toward counterpoise between hope and resistance.

I invite you to join  me.