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."

Activating Compassion

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

I wonder how many people, Christian or not, know of the Gospels' reference to a baptism that happens after the first, familiar one, that by water. The second baptism, of fire and spirit, is crucial to the understanding of the faith which is explicated by Thomas M. King, S.J., in his book Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris).

If the first baptism is the seal of righteousness, the second is the precondition of compassion. It is the guarantor that righteousness does not mean self-righteousness.

The first baptism is that of being spellbound by a verbal enchanter — Jesus was such a one — being taken up out of oneself to an ideal world above this one, a paradisal world of perfect justice in comparison to which our world of impure sense experience can seem utter darkness. We can be so taken by the Word that we seek wholly to abandon the World. This is the Night of the Senses. After it, as various knights-errant, we may devote ourselves to serving our ethical and moral ideals to the exclusion of giving free expression to our own needs and interests.

This typically brings on a Night of the Soul, since such purity of adherence to any impersonal verbal formula or set of commandments is ultimately, we tend to find to our chagrin, beyond our ability. Temptation intervenes in our lives, just as it did for Jesus when he was thrice tempted by the devil in the desert. That is when our baptism of fire can, if we are as steadfast as Jesus was, become a baptism of spirit, a germination of our inborn capacity for humanity an dhumility into the habit of compassion. Compassion, in which we confront the ways in which we are all equally prone to temptation and imperfection, to suffering and weakness, is seemingly the key to the kingdom of heaven on earth.

This is the paradigm of religious experience which King refines from his reading of scripture; from the spiritual biographies of Thomas Merton and Ignatius Loyola; from medieval mystical writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing; as well as from the Dialogues of Plato, Faust, Don Quixote, and a host of other works.

When I peruse King's book, I find it totally convincing. But after putting it down, I find myself asking questions. One of these is that with which I opened above: why is it that so few people think of the Christian faith as one in which the germination of humanity into full-fledged compassion is the crucial point?


We think of righteousness first, and only then (maybe) compassion as the prime directive of Christian living ... right? Righteousness, as in holiness, uprightness, rectitude, or probity; as in virtue, decency, goodness, honesty, integrity. As in being free of sin and going to heaven rather than hell when we die. If we serve God and not Satan, we do so first and foremost by our pious faith, by our turning away from sin, no? That is how we save our souls.

Not only does compassion come in a distant second to moral compunction, some even see religion as the enemy of compassion. In the current issue of TIME magazine, scientist Steven Pinker's article on "The Mystery of Consciousness" betrays such an attitude. Pinker suggests we may never be able to solve the "Hard Problem" about consciousness, no matter how much we learn about the workings of the brain. That problem is the one I talked about in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts (the last of which was "Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans"). To wit, how does our brain give rise to the sheer experience of undergoing its own activity, as we internally monitor its subjective nature? Or, why is it like something to see the color green?

Pinker notes that the religious idea of the soul is akin to this notion that consciousness is an ethereal reality above and beyond the workings of the brain. Lewis Thomas wrote in The Lives of a Cell, according to this article on personal grief in a recent edition of The Baltimore Sun,

... that it would be odd for nature to waste anything as complex as consciousness. "I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for the biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter."

If that's what consciousness is, severable at the filaments of its attachment, then maybe that's also what the soul is. But Pinker nixes that easy identity of soul with consciousness — without going so far as to deny the validity of the Hard Problem, as does philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is a much more impassioned atheist than Pinker is.

Pinker expresses his own distaste for religious belief in his final section, "Toward a New Morality." He finds the scientific impenetrability of consciousness to be an aid to compassion. If each person knows that he or she is conscious as a mysterious property of brain functioning — however unprovable that fact of one's consciousness may be to skeptical others — then every other person with demonstrably similar brain function must be seen also a like vessel of conscious experience, entitled to the same consideration we give to ourselves: "Hath not a Jew — or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog — a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer."

Religion with its concern for the advancement of the individual soul to the afterlife is, to Pinker, the enemy of such a recognition. It can promote cruelty, not compassion: "Just remember the most famous people in recent history who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11."

I'd say that's a caricature — nay, a corruption, a demonic parody — of the idea of religion. Yet it's one to which many religious practitioners are prone, in the name of God or Allah. It's simply incorrect for Pinker to fall into the trap of identifying a thing with its demonic parody. Yet it's understandable that he and others do so. In fact, I'd say it's far more important for someone to find his or her own compassion than to be right about religion.

Beyond Enchantment: A Spirit of Compassion

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

I focus once again on Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Amazon or from Alibris). The more I read it (or, actually, re-read it) the more convinced I become that King puts his finger on the true pulse of what a mature Christian life is all about. Specifically, it is about compassion.

I have talked in earlier posts about the idea of the unavailability of perfect justice in this world, taken as a cornerstone of Christian understanding. I found I was having a hard time pinning down exactly what I mean by justice ... or, rather, by injustice. It gradually dawns on me that my definition of injustice is this: anything that is capable of evoking our compassion.

It seems to me that most of us begin life pretty much blind to injustice ... except, of course, when we ourselves are its victim. Nor does real, human compassion exist as much more than a seed of potentiality within us. What causes that seed to germinate? King suggests an answer: we become "enchanted" by a verbal text, seek to exemplify it fully and to live by it perfectly, and eventually run aground on the sheer impossibility of ever doing so completely.

Then ensues a Dark Night of the Soul, followed by a Second Baptism. The First Baptism, that of Righteousness, is what happens when we take up the task of living strictly by a verbal rule or text. The Dark Night is what overtakes us when we find that such rules from on high — in Christian terms, the Word of God — cannot fully subdue either our sense-experience of this world or our impulses to do otherwise than obey rules. Only then are we ready for a Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

These are things spoken of in the Gospels and by Christian mystics down through the ages. But we hear very little about them from the pulpit today. A Second Baptism? Why, even the First Baptism tends to take place in infancy, in most churches, prior to the onset of mature experience. Not much commitment at that stage to living righteously, in accordance with a verbal text.

Yet there are in the Gospels the experiences of Two Baptisms. The second one, the Baptism of Fire and Spirit, corresponds to Jesus's threefold temptation in the desert by Satan, after his own First Baptism at the hands of John the Baptist. At that time Jesus had consented to live solely by his Father's word: Christians now call that body of text the Old Testament. A voice from Heaven had proclaimed, "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Yet Jesus would have to do more than live that Word. As Flesh, he would have to suffer and die. He would be the victim of such a colossal injustice that his death and resurrection would save us all. Extrapolating from what King says about this, one feels justified in imagining it could not have been possible had Jesus the Man not learned to get beyond the mere enchantment of the divine Word. He had to understand what it was like for us, in an unjust world, in which every verbal formula eventually stubs its toe on the hard rock of woe.

Compassion is only possible when we see that words and formulas alone don't bring full justice to this material world. Righteousness can be taught by rote. Compassion cannot. Perhaps paradoxically, the Christian answer to this difficult truth is not cynically to abandon all words and formulas and rotes, but to travel beyond them as a creature of Word and Spirit, of righteousness and compassion.