Compassionate Kingdom

"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" — Micah 6:8


By now it's no secret that my spirituality seems to have evolved into a concern for justice and, what I believe amounts to the same thing, the extolling of humility, kindness, and compassion. With the help of Google I have stumbled upon an odd website, www.compassion.org, that seems to consist of a single page containing four quotations about compassion. I find all four resonant.

The first of these quotes is from the Catholic monk and author Thomas Merton: "Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." Another site with quotes about compassion cites Merton as saying, "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."

The second quotation is from someone I don't know, Arthur Jersild, who (Googling reveals) is a psychologist and professor of education at Columbia: "Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment."

Quotation number three comes from another source not known to me, Matthew Fox. This article about him appears in Wikipedia. There he is called "a controversial American priest and theologian, and the leading exponent of Creation Spirituality," which is apparently a mystical tradition from the 12th to 15th centuries. The quotation reads, "Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies."

And the fourth quotation, "The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness," comes from the present Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. The Dalai Lama is the supreme head of Tibetan Buddhism, said to be one in a series of incarnations of the bodhisattva, or enlightenment-being, of compassion.

These quotations, taken together, emphasize: gaining a sense of all beings' mutual interdependence; finding spiritual and emotional maturity; enacting justice and mercy; and facilitating love, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness. Christians have an expression that summarizes it all: living in the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God, also called the kingdom of heaven, is spoken of often in the Gospels and throughout the New Testament, but the meaning of the phrase is a bit elusive. Thus, this question put to Father John Dietzen, whose column answering knotty concerns of Roman Catholic belief appears widely in the Catholic press.

Fr. Dietzen addresses the perplexing problem that the kingdom of God is said to be both present now and coming in the future. Rather than thinking of it as "a static, unchanging condition, something finally finished here or perhaps even in the future," we need to imagine it as "active and full of life, constantly at work in everything [God] continually is creating."

The kingdom is, in fact, "God’s reign, his loving rule over all creation" which we can experience as the "compassionate and magnanimous presence of God." As "an ongoing presence," the kingdom "declares that the rule of God is now." This rule of God is to be experienced as "the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world."

Yet the kingdom involves the future just as much as it concerns the present. It is a force working ceaselessly "to re-establish the harmony of creation destroyed by sin." This redemptive process, Fr. Dietzen says, is "part of the mystery of God's creating love." It seeks to establish the perfect justice which our everyday experience finds woefully lacking in this material world.

In view of the reality of the kingdom here and now, yet extending forever into the future, we are urged by Jesus "to trust, not to be afraid. Whatever happens, we are sure of the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world. ... The more we are aware of the power of this divine rule among us now and its continuance in eternity, the greater is our confidence that, in St. Paul’s words, nothing can separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord."