Compassionate understanding
By Taru Bahl

AS children,many of us have bought wounded or ailing animals home, taken pity on infirm beggars and offered our own tiffins and pocket money and owned up to wrongs one hadn’t committed, just to save the younger siblings from a thrashing. Unfortunately, this feeling of innocent, instinctive and child-like compassion gets diminished as we move on in age. Ever-increasing demands of self-interest take over. It is not uncommon to see a child of five retaliating to strike his friend with the same stick he had been hit with. He is not aware of the pain or repercussions of his tit-for-tat action. But how many adults really pass beyond this childish level of complete absorption in one’s own feelings?

We forget that qualities of heart can emerge only from positive emotions like self-contentment and self-esteem. This helps us rise above pettiness and greed, allowing feelings of compassion to take over. These virtues grow progressively as we start sharing the concerns of our fellow beings. Without being told, we must be able to perceive the hurt and damage our angry words would cause. We should be able to sense a person’s need for material help or emotional support much before he asks for it. We should be able to feel others’ agony, pain and misery.

Finally, we should move beyond the more passive stage of feeling, sensitising and pitying into the action-doing mode and do our best to help halve the others’ burden.

The real test of compassion is when in spite of being provoked to be insolent and mean, we choose to treat others with respect. When we are truly compassionate, we enter into an appreciation of the joys and sorrows of the other person. We allow our heart to take precedence over the head. We make the time to follow Helen Keller’s advice to "stop, look and see". We derive greater happiness by giving than receiving. One of the most moving acts of compassion in the Bible and all of literature is the decision of the Pharaoh’s daughter to adopt the baby Moses. This action of hers transcends cultural and class barriers, ultimately leading to the founding of the Hebrew nation.

To quote William Bennett from the Book of Virtues, "Just as courage takes its stand by others in challenging situations, so compassion takes its stand with others in their distress. Compassion is a virtue that takes seriously the reality of other persons, their inner lives, emotions as well as their external circumstances. It is an active disposition towards fellowship and supportive companionship in distress or in woe". According to Rousseau, compassion is a natural feeling, which by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species. It is this compassion that hurries us without reflection to the relief of those who are in distress.

Compassion is the maturing of kindness. The dictionary defines it as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another’s suffering or misfortune accompanied by a desire to alleviate the pain or remove its cause. To feel another’s anguish is the essence of compassion. Hans Christian Andersen’s sentimental story, The Little Match Girl, brings tears to the eyes of the reader because it stirs up compassionate emotions. The story goes like this. On New Year’s Eve, there is this beautiful girl who is trying to earn a few pennies by selling matches. As it becomes darker, she is wonder struck seeing festive lights springing up all around her. Everyone is carrying beautifully-wrapped gifts, wearing nice warm clothes, settling down to cozy dinner parties near their fireplaces amidst streamers and buntings. Shivering in the snow, she keeps lighting up one match after another to keep herself warm. In the morning, people find her sitting huddled against a wall, with a bundle of burnt matchsticks, frozen to death on the last and coldest night of the previous year.

If this story stirs up feelings of compassion which in turn compel the reader to take pity on those who may be less fortunate than us, to be more charitable and giving, the story of The Beauty and the Beast takes us to a yet higher plane. When Beauty asks her father to get her a rose from his travels abroad while her sisters asked for expensive gifts, little did she know that he would be penalised for his action. He had dared to pluck a rose from the Beast’s garden for which he was asked to send one of his daughters to look after him. None were ready to go, but Beauty relented since she held herself responsible and also she could not bear to see her father suffer the consequences of denial. Living with the Beast amidst all the comfort of the palace, she still could not bring herself to kiss him as he bade her to. Gradually she became less and less afraid of him, no longer trembling in his ugly presence, appreciating his kindness, courtesy, warmth and tenderness. When her father falls ill, the Beast sends her immediately to look after him but urges her to return the moment he recovers. When she returns after a longish spell, she sees the palace in a state of disarray and the Beast nowhere in sight. When she frantically searches for him and finds him lying in a comatose state in the garden she rushes to him, cradles his head in her lap and kisses him out of a sense of relief. Lo and behold! he turns into a handsome prince, her warm and affectionate kiss breaking the spell which had been cast upon him by a wicked witch and the rest, as they say, is history. But Beauty, meanwhile, teaches the reader two things — not to judge anything by its outer appearance and to allow compassion to inspire us to do things for others. Not just to feel compassionately but to do compassionately as well.

A journalist when filing a human interest story relies on his own compassionate streak to lend a ‘soft’ touch to his subject, a touch which will in addition to presenting the facts objectively, also communicate to the readers a sense of compassion and sympathetic understanding. Which is why when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash as she and Dodi tried to shrug off the paparazzi who were chasing them for yet another juicy, meaty, money-spinning photograph, it shook the social conscience of Britain who like vultures were feeding on the sensational tabloid tid-bits. The paparazzi were accused of being cruel, and insensitive. They could never hope to understand the agony of the couple they were chasing, whose privacy they were intruding upon and selling to the collective majority. The same streak of compassion is what prevents newspaper editors from choosing less harsh headlines, toning down their unconfirmed accusations and avoiding giving gory details or photographs of accidents, rapes and murders.

It is not always because of the fear of a lawsuit but also because they do not want to hurt those who may be directly involved. They do not want to create a false alarm, a sense of panic among their general readers. This sensitivity stems from compassion. Similarly, people who take to vegetarianism, do so largely because of their compassion for animals. They believe in love and compassion being the hallmark of their relationship with all of God’s creatures, whether humans or animals.

Compassion must be placed at the heart of human life, in a world governed far too long by principles of power and destructive control. Compassion is no longer merely an eraser of human mistakes, it is a force of prayer and action — the expression of God’s love for us and our love for Him and one another. Compassion should pervade the spirit and spur us towards the constructive good of mankind. Compassion is as close to our ‘natural’ disposition as any of the other virtues. The challenge lies in not allowing animosity and prejudice to stunt its natural growth. And to keep the divisive ‘isms’ — racism, sexism, and chauvinism etc--at bay.