Compassion

I have many things to be confused about at this point in my spiritual journey. In many ways I know less about God than I did 10 years ago, and certainly less about what it means, personally, to be a faithful follower of Christ. But within that sea of confusion and not-knowing, I am clear about one thing: I want to learn to be a more compassionate human being. I have no idea where else I am going, but I do know that I am being called into learning something about compassion.

In the last few years, God has given me a couple of glimpses of what compassion can be: mystical experiences in which I have been given the supernatural gift of compassion. I wrote about them last October in the entry entitled The Teaching Moment. How, then, do I “learn” compassion? How do I live into the glimpse God has given me of what can be? How can I be intentional about acquiring a virtue that can only be a gift from God?

My desire for compassion started as a small impulse--a quiet but insistent urge. It grew in me almost unnoticed. Even the times God gifted me with compassion, the experience soon became lost to memory in the details of my days. But the impulse to pursue compassion must have been growing deep in my soul for some time, unbeknownst to me. A few weeks ago, that hidden impulse took root and has since become irrisitable.

It seems like it is a paradoxical thing, this learning of compassion. It is not something I can cultivate, only something I can receive. And yet I won’t receive it unless I cultivate it. A quality I pursue until I am captured by it. That’s the paradox—a paradox that creates the need for a delicate balance between agency and receptivity. The paradox that I find at the core of all things of God.

Seduced by God, Part II

Oh Lord, you have seduced me, and I have been seduced. You have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.

This is Jeremiah, the poor schnook God chose to be God’s prophet. Jeremiah discovered, like many prophets before and since him, that it is not easy being a prophet. He becomes a laughing stock of his people; he does not have a normal life with wife and kids, a normal job, identity or place in society. All he has is God and the words God gives him to say to the Israelites. When he tries to stay silent, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. Poor Jeremiah. He is not in control of his life or of his destiny. All he has is God.

This is what happens when we get seduced by God: we don’t have a “normal” life as defined by the culture around us. We lose all of that, until all we have is God. Although not called to be a prophet, God has seduced me nonetheless. God swells my heart with love until it feels like it is going to burst, saturates me in grace, showers me with impulses of pure light and in general ravishes my soul until I am besotted with God and for God and beside myself with God’s delight. Even as I revel in God’s grace and mercy, I know I am going to pay for this intimacy with God. In the end, it is a price I gladly pay, because all ego-driven delights pale in comparison.

God is an oh-so-jealous God. God is particularly jealous of those for whom God has a peculiar predilection. For those souls, God will allow nothing to interfere or disrupt intimacy. God methodically destroys all barriers, idolatries, ego projections, and identities that interfere with the soul’s embrace by God. With an exactitude that only the soul’s Creator can imagine, God breaks, chips away at, releases, dissolves, shatters, crushes and grinds into nothingness all that hinders communion with God, all that stands in the way of intimacy, all that is not of God. It is an exquisite torture.

Oh Lord, you have seduced me, and I have been seduced. You have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.

This detaching process is, for me at least, painful and at times violent. My knee jerk reaction is to cling to false idols. But mostly the suffering comes because I forget. I forget that I have asked God to draw me close, to sweep away all that is not God. I forget that this destruction is my deepest desire—I can only see all that I am losing. And so I suffer and complain and despair. That is what makes it torture. Other spiritual writers talk about how the mature soul learns to say “here I am, a handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be done according to your word”. But I am never inclined to that response, and consequently suffer.

But then I remember—because God reminds me. I remember how besotted I am with my Lover, how intimacy with God is my deepest desire. And then the suffering is transformed and the torture becomes exquisite—the fulfillment of my heart’s desire. I quit looking at what I have lost and feeling sorry for myself, and I look to God’s mercy instead. I wait on God’s goodness. God fills me with God’s sweetness, and I am transported into communion with my divine Lover.

It is a paradox. Like Jeremiah, I am overpowered by God, and God prevails. I am defeated as God shapes my will into God’s will. There is a strong theme of coercion, even rape, by God in Jeremiah and in my own experience of God. At the same time, this defeat is the deepest desire of my heart and feeds my most deeply rooted passion—to uproot the not-God so that I may know the incomparable sweetness of God’s grace. That in my own weakness I may know God’s powerful love. That in the shambles of my life I might find the new life my Creator and Lover wants for me. I see God most clearly in the darkness.

Oh Lord, you have seduced me, and I have been seduced. You have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.