Compassion

There is a scene in Inside Out where Sadness and Joy, the emotions inside 11-year-old Riley’s head, are stuck in the recesses of the 5th-grader’s brain. They meet Riley’s old imaginary friend, Bing Bong, and he offers them a short cut. Instead of going around a long, winding building, the three characters can go through the building. Bing Bong leads them through a door with a sign over it that says “danger” in big, red letters, and when they are in the middle of a dark room, the lights turn on. They find themselves inside the part of the brain that likes to contemplate big, complex topics and break them down — meaning that the characters themselves are turned into ideas and broken down. They become cubist versions of themselves, then 2D figures, then 2D lines. They are abstracted to the point of not looking like themselves at all, and when they finally escape, Bing Bong (who is part dolphin, part cotton candy) admits that they should never have entered the room in the first place. 

I, personally, love to use that chamber of my mind. I love to chew on thoughts and get ideas down to bite size, easy to understand pieces. I want to make the thoughts pretty; to slice off all the hard edges and boil things down to something I can understand. This is good, sometimes. We need to refine our ideas, to take our experiences and make them into something we can understand, or, at least, let them teach us more deeply by letting them soak into our brains in a different way. But my brain likes to turn everything into idealism, and idealism will only take you so far. I’ve taken the things I love the most, including my faith, and tried to boil them down in this abstraction room, only to realize that I’ve boiled down the wrong pieces into the wrong idea. My God, for instance, has often been about ideas and theories and beautiful words; but the real God, the real Christ, doesn’t seem care all that much about big words or big ideas. What God really seems to care about is a specific person — never “people” in the abstract, but the actual human standing right in front of him. 

That’s the problem with Jesus — he often cares about the things you don’t want to care about, and doesn’t care about the things you think he should care the most about. He’s asleep in the boat while the storm is raging;  he’s at the well with a Samaritan woman. He’s eating with prostitutes and tax collectors. He’s loving the poorest of the poor, but also choosing to invite himself over for dinner with the ones who exploit those same people. He’s not who you want him to be; he’s always blowing your preconceived notions out of the water. He’s certainly not what I made him out to be when I tried to boil him down to a 2D line; he can’t be contained in that way. God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, cannot be contained within abstraction. They must be experienced in real life.

This makes me angry. I wish it wasn’t so, but I want a God that makes everything perfect, right now. I want him to fulfill my idealism. I want him to be what I want him to be. But down here in the real world, where I cry tears of grief and rage into the broken dirt and am forced to go the long way around, I realize that this is the only way to reach compassion. Compassion does not come from mountaintop dreaming; it is born from the lives we live in the mud, in the valley. Compassion is a messy thing, and most of the time I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was clean, and orderly, and bite-size. Compassion, though, is born out of grief, which is often rightly covered up with rage. There are two different paths we can take when we meet rage head on: bitterness or love. We can let the rage harden, or we can let it soften into grief, and then into compassion, and then, eventually, into love. When we take the shortcut, we often intellectualize the world’s pain instead of choosing to step inside of it and let it change us. 

Compassion is looking my friend in the eye when she is facing eviction and not losing her gaze, when the only thing I want to do is dig a hole in the earth and forget that any of this pain exists. It means looking at the child in front of me and letting him be himself, instead of asking him to be the person I think he should be. Compassion means directly confronting my idealism every day, in little ways, and it isn’t massive or important or grand. Compassion is found in the dirt. It’s bred in a March garden, when everything is bleak and there’s just digging in the soggy soil. Compassion, at its heart, is ugly. That’s the real problem: the world isn’t 2D and shiny. It’s complex, and oftentimes it isn’t pleasing to the eye. But Christ didn’t shy away from the ugly parts of life — he met them, and he walked with them. This is compassion: to embrace the long way ‘round, to step into the brokenness on your doorstep, and to choose to let the dirt of this world touch us in our deepest places and change how we see.