I am completely sold on the idea of interdependence. I have seen and continue to see how nothing of what I do and am is solely the product of my own doing. I have been supported, helped, hurt, understood, protected, exposed, driven, rejected, and accepted by so many other people in my life, and each of those actions, some I loved and some I hated, have all had a shaping effect on my life.
It’s just so much easier to want to see my life woven into a web of beauty, support, joy, harmony, peace, kindness, and the like than it is to see that the tapestry of my being includes other things that are not so sweet. There are people in the world and in my life right now who are doing and supporting horrible things, and I am at a loss for what to do except to grieve, and to be angry, and to worry, and to resist them, their ideas, and their actions. If I am honest, all of that is also weaving into who I am. What I resist matters in being who I am just as what I embrace matters. They both help me see and grasp a little more of the truth.
My experience of compassion invites me to consider your suffering, allows me to experience suffering together with you, requires me to notice your suffering, conjures my curiosity about how I might respond to your suffering, and calls me to be courageous in league with you about the suffering we hold together.
It strikes me rather harshly but realistically, that my experience of compassion requires me to remember the good in life and to hold those who have forgotten the good. Here is what I am wrestling with that, for compassion’s sake. When I encounter someone who is bent on cruelty and hatred, I am trying to hold them as one whose inner sense of goodness has become lost to them. And here’s how I pray. I acknowledge the spot of good left in that person, and I ask the Spirit of Love and Compassion to touch it, to renew it, and to call it back into that person’s memory and life. It’s my way of contributing to the tapestry of who they are because, like it or not, they are contributing to the tapestry of who we all are. How are you wrestling with the compassion in interdependence?
~Bob Patrick
