Growing in Compassion

By Fr. Carl Chudy, SX
Recently I was asked to react to the talk of Sr. Donna Markham, OP on religious life and the commitment to compassion at the national assembly of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in Columbus, Ohio. Sr. Donna is currently head of Catholic Charities in the United States. Here is what I presented.
I am grateful for Donna’s profound reflection on the mystery of compassion as it is shared through the myriad of charisms that make up religious life globally.  In response to her thoughtful question, I’d like to share how I am learning a sense of compassion and mercy through the lens of our congregational charism which centers on our Catholic outreach to those who do not know Christ. If any charism is a response to humanity’s deepest needs, then compassion and mercy is its main expression.
Donna began with the horrible violence that has rocked our nation and the politicization of it during an election cycle.  The sense of crushing grief and helplessness overwhelmed me and still does. I retreated to a poem by Scott Cairn called Evening Prayer:

And what would you pray in the troubled midst

of this our circular confusion save

that the cup be taken away? That the chill

and welling of the blood might suffer by His

hushed mercy to abate, to calm the legion

dumb anxieties as each now clamors

to be known and named? The road has taken

on, of late, the mute appearance of a grief

whose leaden gravity both insists on speed

and slows the pilgrim’s progress to a crawl.

At the least he’s found his knees. I bear a dim

suspicion that this circumstance will hold

unyielding hegemony until the day.

What would you pray at the approach of this

late evening? What ask? And of whom?

Compassion for me has come from all of the places where I was called to hold grief of others, sometimes for an indeterminable period that chafed at my very soul. Cairn’s poem is about the tough times with no magical happy ending, where evening prayer is not a consolation but a reminder of our dark pain that we have no idea what to do with, except hold, keep it close, let it either harden me or break me into something new.
I am reminded of the words of the preface for the second Eucharistic Prayer of Reconciliation: “For though the human race is divided by dissension and discord, yet we know that by testing us, you change our hearts to prepare them for reconciliation.” For me, I have evolved over a long period of time in mission in three different continents in the world, cross cultural ministry with the poor and youth in the United States through many tests that elicited expressions of mercy I could never predict.
As someone once said, “Life is a test, and maybe that is the way it is supposed to be.” Scripture outlines around 200 opportunities where God tests us. I don’t mean that God, in some cruel way, tries to see how much we can take, but compassion is learned through the hard knocks of confronting inhuman cruelty and injustice as we accompany victims and survivors, and as we confront cruelty in life, we confront our limitations and possibilities in the face of these realities, and discovering strength and courage we never knew we had.
For the sake of time, my latest lessons in compassion have been in the culture of religious hate, Islamaphobia and xenophobia that reverberates in many communities nationwide. My take on the work of interfaith dialogue for our congregation is not only about reaching out in support to our Muslim brothers and sisters who feel very uncertain in their own home, for example, but working to have a Catholic voice together with other faith and non-faith voices that confronts fear and ignorance. The Catholic Church cannot do this alone.
It is also encouraging Catholic communities, sometimes with great difficulty, to experientially understand that without our interfaith outreach, we cannot counter our temptation to insularity, much like the priest and Pharisee in the gospel reading Donna shared with us. We run the risk of becoming a Catholic island with no real meaningful connection in the great sea of humanity.  Interfaith literacy, helping Catholics understand Islam, for example, and fostering relationships with each other, is about creating bridges that go both ways. We are asked to be a seed of unity and peace in a world struggling with its diversity. In this case my sense of compassion is very much shaped by the response we muster as disciples of Christ to the things that divide us as people in the US today.
Being inspired by others merciful lives, also teaches much. 
I talked with a Sikh man at the Parliament of World’s Religions, which took place last fall in Salt Lake City, gathering 10,000 people from fifty faiths and humanism. He works with the Arizona Interfaith Alliance. He said that two of his brothers were murdered because the killers thought his brothers were Muslim. One was killed in Arizona. His second brother was killed in San Francisco. He told me that he went into a horrible period of depression and came out of it by dedicating his life to interfaith dialogue and collaboration, healing divisions from the ashes of his brother’s murders.
It mirrored the shootings at the Sikh Temple in 2012 in Oak Creek, Wisconsin by Michael Page, a white supremacist who killed six people and wounded four others before committing suicide. The shock and grief of the Sikh community reverberated through the entire area of many different faiths and beliefs. Mercy and compassion I learned here is a heartfelt communal experience as many came to console and pray with their Sikh neighbors. This was the first contact with the Sikh community for a good number of people. This incident fostered an outpouring of compassion which was truly held and offered by a community of strangers across faith and non-faith lines. As a result, this compassion spurred ongoing educational opportunities in interfaith understanding and our common ground of compassion and mercy in a local program called NOT IN OUR TOWN. The program links religious communities and the police in the important work of stopping hate.
Henri Nouwen, whose early book, The Wounded Healer, had a big impact on me as a seminarian, as I was attempting to put together what it meant to be a missionary in the contemporary world today. He says if we are incapable of embracing our own sense of personal woundedness with some level of acceptance and learning, we can never do that for others. It is our own wounds that may be a source of healing for others, as with the cry of Isaiah:

“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53.5)

He uses the paradigm of hospitality. If someone does not feel at home in his own house, how can he welcome the unexpected guest? He said:

“Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.”

I am still learning these lessons in new and amazingly challenging ways.