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.