Compassion may come from this hardship
How have you been feeding yourself and your family through this pandemic? Ordering groceries on-line? Reduced trips to the supermarket? Are the take-out containers filling your trash buckets? Perhaps you have used a combination of all three. Desperate times call for drastic measures -– or at least different ones. I say this as I take yet another loaf of homemade bread out of the oven!
But the other question is — how have you been feeding your soul? This question may require a deeper look — one that goes beyond the weekly sales fliers and the take-out menus.
Zoom services have been offered by many traditions and, in most cases, reports are that these have been well attended. Going to church in our PJs might just become a “thing.” Have you been reading more, doing yoga in abandoned parking lots or sitting beneath the moon light in meditation? Welcome to New Practices 2020.
Whatever path you are following and whatever medium you are using, I hope that it deepens your faith and grows your spirituality. Most of all, I hope that it extends and expands your connection to creation and it lessens the separation that we often feel — sometimes as a result of this pandemic and sometimes as a result of limited thinking. In fact, during times of separation, we might see just how, in our core, we are deeply and profoundly connected.
As we mature both in spirit and in age, I believe we become more able to understand these foundational parts of our lives that are common ground for connection. And especially in the midst of shared suffering, when we recognize our common pain and make peace with our personal pain, we develop compassion for each other — even when we see the world from a different perspective. Suffering is, after all, suffering.
Yes, I wish that we didn’t have to suffer so very much in order for compassion to grow; but it seems that along with that pain and the reconciliation of it, our compassion for each other grows. Order, it seems, springs from disorder, as compassion springs from experiencing suffering and making peace with it. And these days there is plenty of disorder and pain to witness.
My heart rests in the fact that, while it may take us all a while to get there, order will rise from disorder and compassion and forgiveness will rise from suffering and judgment. One thing I know is that it will take all of us, in community with each other and The Divine to co-create and sustain this foundation of compassion.
We need to feed each other; not just bread from our ovens but bread from our souls, richly blessed by The Holy One. Let us feast — body and soul — at a table wide enough to hold us all.