It is difficult in thee days to have a heart of compassion for others, and somewhat rare for people to even try.  To be sure, to be like God one needs mercy as well as justice, and both are exceedingly difficult to show, not least because our standards of justice are typically slanted towards ourselves and those who are like us and because we tend not to be merciful towards those whom we are not just for.  As a result, we tend to live our lives with a limited reservoir of compassion that sometimes even fails to be sympathetic towards those whose lives are like our own, much less those for whom empathy would be a more difficult and challenging task.  Let us examine some of the ways in which we would tend not to be compassionate to other people and then ponder what a more compassionate response would be in such circumstances.

I really hate bad traffic, and it is all too common when one lives in and around big cities that are in denial about the fact that managing population size requires a sane attitude towards building roads and so on.  In fact, I frequently play a game in my head that ponders how many fewer people would be necessary in a given area or on a given road in order for there to be a smooth drive.  Often that one person happens to be a disabled vehicle sticking out into a lane that slows traffic to a crawl behind it or an accident or someone being pulled over that results in a visual slowdown.  It is fairly easy to be compassionate to drivers of disabled vehicles, knowing that many of us drive around jalopies that very well could need help at some point or another.  It is also understandable, if irritating, that people would slow down when approaching an accident or flashing lights, seeing that people are curious and tend (sensibly) to slow down in the presence of police officers.  As annoying as it is to have one’s travel slowed down, it makes sense that this would happen in a world where our attention is easily distracted by what is around us and our own curiosity about those circumstances.

As some people might be aware of, I am greatly fond of social media.  There are, of course, some dangers about being fond of social media, not least the fact that it it is fairly easy to be unsympathetic towards people whose perspective one seeks as insane and whose ideas one holds in derision and contempt.  Whether one tends to be the sort of person who easily looks at the thought processes of others with contempt or one tends to find one’s own thinking and reasoning viewed as contemptible, it is an easy thing to lose one’s sense of compassion for others and to become an internet troll.  Just about anyone who has posted something online has seen this sort of behavior where people are motivated to say nasty things about someone or their ideas or thoughts and especially collaborate with others.  I have had that happen with book reviews that were mildly critical that an author was offended by, and others have found such online bullying to be immensely taxing and painful.  Clearly, adopting the attitude of an internet troll is not going to help one be compassionate towards others.

It is also clear that compassion should start closest to home, because lacking compassion for those close to us will tend to make our compassion to others appear particularly hypocritical.  It is by no means an easy thing to show compassion to people who see the worst of us and who can get under our skin and have a lot of opportunities to annoy us and bother us, but if we cannot show respect and affection for those close to us then whatever compassion we show to those further away is not demonstrative of a changed heart but rather an attitude that finds it easier to be kind to those where there is a sense of distance.  I must admit personally that some sense of distance makes it easier to be kind to someone and to not be annoyed or irritated by them and I suspect the opposite is often true as well.  And still, we are called to practice compassion and that love would be the sign by which people would be able to recognize Jesus’ disciples, and yet what the Bible considers love is not something that this world would recognize as love, even if we were better at doing what we were called to do.