A Reading from Karen Armstrong’s "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life"
The religious systems have all discovered that it is indeed possible to nourish the shoots of compassion and learn to withstand the me-first mechanisms of the old reptilian brain. Human beings have always been prepared to work hard to enhance a natural ability. We doubtless learned to run and jump in order to escape from our predators, but from these basic skills we developed ballet and gymnastics: after years of dedicated practice men and women acquire the ability to move with unearthly grace and achieve physical feats that are impossible for an untrained body. We devised language to improve communications and now we have poetry, which pushes speech into another dimension. In the same way, those who have persistently trained themselves in the art of compassion manifest new capacities in the human heart and mind; they discover that when they reach out consistently toward others, they are able to live with the suffering that inevitably comes their way with serenity, kindness and creativity. They find that they have a new clarity and experience a richly intensified state of being.
Do we want to succumb to our reptilian brain, when we have seen for ourselves what can happen when hatred, disgust, greed, or the desire for vengeance consume entire groups? In our perilously divided world, compassion is in our best interest. To acquire it, however, will demand an immense effort of mind and heart…. We have a natural capacity for compassion as well as for cruelty. We can either emphasize those aspects of traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion, or work with those that stress the interdependence of all human beings. The choice is ours.
Read as a spiritual reflection during Judith Liro's sermon of Nov 20, 2011
