According to the dictionary the word ‘compassion’ describes the act of ‘witnessing suffering and desiring to alleviate it’. Compassion, when flowing from a healthy heart, is what drives us to meet the needs of those who have nothing to give us in return. It’s what prompts us to donate money when we see charity adverts highlighting the plights of individuals all over the world. It’s what causes us to stop and hand a homeless man a sandwich. It’s what gives us the ability to love and cherish small fluffy creatures (and our children) – even after they’ve pooped on the carpet!
Although compassion is universal, tragically some of us have never experienced it. Much of my work in Mental Health involves modeling and teaching compassion to broken souls who were never treated compassionately by a parent or care-giver; in Psychology we call this practice ‘unconditional positive regard’. As clinicians we choose to embody compassion in order to foster a strong, trusting therapeutic relationship between therapist and patient – a patient who may never have been able to trust anyone. We can then begin to teach compassion from scratch, using understanding language, expressing warmth, being reliable, and refusing to use blaming or shaming words. Through this teaching and modeling of compassion we begin to pierce through anger, self-hatred, self-criticism and feelings of worthlessness.
Compassion focused therapy is not just some hippy, new-aged idea to create warm fuzzy feelings. Scientific research has shown that compassion encourages behavioural change in a way that punishment and criticism can’t. Our society has long used ‘blame and shame’ as a way of inducing ‘good behaviour’ right from the classroom to the court room, we choose to point the finger and humiliate those we feel have been naughty, sinned, or broken the law. Punishment and humiliation induce fear and shame, and fear and shame can be effective in creating short-term behavioural change, but at the expense of also inducing hopelessness and self-loathing, which in themselves lead to negative behaviours. Compassion on the other hand has a surprising effect; rather than condoning bad behaviour or reducing responsibility, responding compassionately has been shown to effectively increase motivation, empower individuals, encourage responsibility and create a sustainable desire for change. When we model compassion the offender does not hear the shaming words he/she is expecting, but instead receives love. Shame says ‘we are different – you are broken and bad’, whereas compassion says ‘we are same – we make mistakes, there is hope for you’.
Some of this research comes from the aviation industry (read Black Box Thinking – Matthew Syed). In order to improve the safety of flying for passengers and pilots across the globe, the aviation industry were forced to switch ‘blame culture’ for a ‘learning culture’. Pilots on average make several mistakes per flight –I know, scary right! Aviation leaders realized if they were going to improve flight safety they needed pilots to report their mistakes in order to improve the system. For pilots to feel they could report their mistakes they needed to know they would not be ‘blamed’ but that they would be understood. Since adopting this ‘learning culture’ in place of ‘blame culture’ the number of mistakes reported dramatically increased, but the number of accidents dramatically decreased. When we deal with error and failure compassionately, we create the space to investigate what went wrong and how things can improve.
So what does this mean for the Church? Interestingly, I’m going to address this by first looking at the often-cited South African ‘Babemba Tribe’ and their ritual for dealing with crime;
‘In the Babemba tribe, when someone does something harmful, they take the person to the center of the village where the whole tribe comes and surrounds them.For two days, they will remind the man of all the good things that he has done, citing his positive attributes and previous good deeds.The tribe believes that each human being comes into the world as good. Each one of us only desiring safety, love, peace and happiness. But sometimes, in the pursuit of these things, people make mistakes. The community sees those mistakes as a cry for help. They unite then to lift him, to reconnect him with his true nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth of which he had been temporarily disconnected: “I am good.”’
This tribe have compassion down. They understand its power and appear to use it fully. We have no details about the outcome of this method – but if we go by the research previously discussed, I would hazard a guess that the offender is successfully rehabilitated.
Relating back to the Church, and our Christian identity, one thing stood out in the report of the Babemba people – they acknowledged that each human being comes into the world as ‘good’. Now dependent on your theology you might agree with me that this is biblical. The Bible says we have all been created in God’s image and that ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’ (Gen 1:31). If we believe this is the truth we should be reminding ourselves and others every day, shouting it from the rooftops even! When we begin to take the stance that God has created humans as inherently good we begin to see the value in ourselves, and in the people around us. We see mistakes as mistakes and use the compassion of Jesus to say time and again ‘you are loved, you are forgiven’. You know why Jesus saved the woman from stoning? Not because she apologised, grovelled, took upon herself the humiliation of her crime, no – he saved her because he had compassion upon her; ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone’ – ie: ‘we’re all the same, we make mistakes, there is hope for this woman’.
As Christians and as the Church, we need to ask ourselves if we are fully embodying this attribute of compassion. I’ve heard many times from zealous street preachers that it is ‘loving’ or ‘compassionate’ to shout at people that they are sinners who will burn in hell whilst holding placards stating ‘God hates homosexuals’. I don’t agree with that, what I do know is that ‘God hates haughty eyes’ (Proverbs 6:17) – we need to put down any demonstration of self-righteousness, arrogant pride, or lack of compassion. We don’t need to blame, shame or tell people they are bad – they already believe those things!! We need to compassionately remind people that God created them in His image, that they are inherently GOOD, that we will never stop loving and forgiving and understanding. Compassionate truth holds the key to sustainable change in people’s lives, it is the food of solid discipleship, and like fresh water on a scorching day to those who have fallen. That is compassion, and Jesus is all about compassion.