The Role of Compassion in Transformation

In southern Poland in 1942, Samuel Oliner, then age 12, hid in an attic while the Nazis took away his family, drove them to a nearby woods and killed them, along with 1,000 other Jews. Oliner wandered around in a grief stricken stupor for several days before he made his way to the home of a non-Jewish family he had known before the war.

The woman of the house took in the young Oliner and fed and comforted him. Then she let him stay in their attic for some time and taught him how to pass for Catholic. He learned the catechism and the Lord’s Prayer and how to genuflect and say the rosary. Oliner then found work at a farm where he spent the rest of the war after having changed his name and identity.

When he grew up, Oliner became a sociologist and started studying why some people were capable of great acts of kindness like that which he had experienced at the hands of the remarkably caring woman who saved his life. When he interviewed other people from this era who had aided the Jews to determine why they did what they did, he got responses like these:

• “Our religion says we are our brother’s keeper.”
• “I sensed I had in front of me human beings that were hunted down like wild animals. This aroused a feeling of brotherhood and a desire to help.”
• “I was always filled with love for everyone, for every creature, for things. I am fused into every object. For me everything is alive.”
• “[My parents] taught me to respect all human beings.”

These replies are based in profoundly religious sentiments that speak to a deeply felt sense of interconnection with others, even those different in significant ways from oneself. This sense of interconnection coupled with moral commitment motivated many people to do things for others at a time when providing such help was extremely risky and sometimes fatal.

Compassion of this sort is both instinctive and learned. In other words, we each have the capacity for great compassion and for acting on this compassion, but such altruism must be cultivated and nurtured. In fact, Oliner found that the strongest predictor for determining which Germans helped rescue Jews during World War II was having memories of growing up in a family that placed a high priority on altruism and compassion.

Without such compassion, people are much less likely to take meaningful moral action in the world. Without such compassion, transformation of self and others is impossible.

We do well to remember that compassion is the engine that drives transformation. For the sake of ourselves and our children and the world, we must nurture and cultivate and teach compassion in all that we do. When we are faithful to this task, we are on the path of religious transformation.

Transformation and the Sacred "And"

During my first year of seminary, I was working each morning at a men’s homeless shelter. I was there Monday through Friday 6:30 a.m. – 8:30 a.m., and then I would walk two blocks to my day job as a fundraiser for a major university.

While the geographic distance between those two places was only a couple of blocks, they were actually worlds apart.

• At the shelter, I was dealing with people who had not a dime to their name. At work, I was dealing with people who had given—or were considering giving—multi-million dollar gifts to fund professorships or scholarships or other major endowments.
• At the shelter, everything was falling apart or held together through temporary, makeshift means. Everything at my office was pristine by comparison—fresh paint, new carpeting, state-of-the-art technology.
• At the shelter, the clients were mostly invisible to the world at large unless something went very wrong. At my office, our donors were among the most visible people in our society.

Two worlds just two blocks apart. And I dwelt in both.

Learning to hold that disparity was great training for ministry. When you set out on a path of service to the wider world, you soon find out that everywhere there are huge chasms of difference. Many of them are the results of terrible and often shameful injustices.

But whatever their origins or reason for existence, one must recognize that they exist before one can hope to do anything approaching meaningful service. It requires a great deal of hard work to hold both in one’s consciousness—especially without attempting immediately to judge or resolve them in some way.

But that embrace of all things exactly as they are is a necessary first step.

The work of transformation requires us to hold in a similar way this fundamental disparity: (A) the way things are and (B) the way things might be. Our tendency is to glance at A (but not too closely) and then try to wish our way into B. Or, if we happen to be pretty comfortable with the way things are for us (without regard for the rest of the world), then we don't even worry much about either A or B.

But religious transformation can occur only when, together, we shine a light on how things are right now, and then, together, discern how to live our way into what might be. In this way, we do not transcend the present world. Rather, we incarnate the world that might be.

Transformation through Interruption and Flight

William James, the famous American philosopher of religion, used the metaphor of perching and flight to describe how human consciousness moves along the path of transformation. Like birds following a stream, we tend to fly, perch, then fly again in a slightly different direction, zig-zagging our way toward whatever destination we reach.

The moments of perching are when we gather ourselves, take a look around and determine what direction we’ll take next. Perching gives us some measure of repose and an opportunity for reflection and rest.

But it is during flight that interesting things occur. The moment birds leave their perch, they are aware that all is not exactly as they thought it might be: the wind is slightly stronger or coming from a different direction than it had been; that tree ahead, which at first appeared to be a good perching place, now appears to be the stalking place of a falcon; the movement and calls of other birds inform them that trouble is on the way or that the weather is about to change.

It is during flight—especially during those parts of flight that bring us in close proximity with others—that our expectations and our assumptions are interrupted and challenged. The interruptions that we experience cause us to change the course of our flight sometimes and give us something to think about and to integrate into our changed selves when next we perch.

While perching, we reflect on the information and intuitions we gained while flying, and then, with an altered perspective, we take to the air again. If we stay on the perch too long, we are less likely to gain the new experiences we need in order to transform ourselves or one another or the world.

Dynamic religious community provides us a place for intentional interruption. In such a place, covenant becomes the container for a free and open discourse and discernment that acts as an interruption from our individual perchings. Discourse and discernment in a free, covenantal religious community are what gives it its power and are the ways in which it moves ahead.

While religious community can also be a place to perch from time to time, it loses its purpose when it fails to take flight. It is only when we fly that we begin to experience the promise of transformation, of moving from the old self to the new, from old attitudes and actions to new ways of thinking and acting in the world.

Far too often in religious community, we tend to work toward perching and nesting as our ultimate goal, laboring under the delusion that once we get something perfectly settled and “right,” then we shall not have to move from our place ever again. But life has a tendency to make us fly, whether we want to or not. Better to take flight of our own volition than to be dumped to the ground when the bottom falls out of our rotting nests.

When we are able to perch with an eye toward where we will fly next, we are following the path of discernment that will transform each and every one of us in deep and often unexpected ways.

The Nature of Transformation

When I was in my 20s (and occasionally since then), I was what I would call a lost soul. For me, that means being unable to imagine my life as a journey. There have been times in my life when everything seems to be a string of somewhat related but not deeply connected events. At those times, I am unable to imagine anything like an arc that connects the various phases and stages of my life.

At some point in my 30s, I began to understand that I was being held back by my expectation that life would unfold in a linear fashion—that one thing would lead to another in a neat progression. And when that progression failed to materialize, all I could perceive was chaos. The moment I was able to let go of linearity was the moment that my life as a journey (at least metaphorically) began.

Therein lies a truth about transformation: it does not occur in a straight line (or even a wiggly one). It’s more like a circle, but not quite. We do keep coming round and round to the same issues/problems/challenges in our lives. But, if we are on a path of transformation, each time we come round to that familiar challenge, we find that we have gained a bit more awareness—awareness about ourselves and others and the world—that helps us choose a slightly different direction.

In short, transformation moves in a spiral. We go around the circle one way or another, but, when we are undergoing transformation, we move in a third dimension outward (or upward or downward). Such is the transformative path.

In religious transformation, the outward (or upward or downward) direction depends upon our individual and shared discernment. The beauty and the challenge of religious transformation is that we have a profound influence upon one another’s paths, as well as our shared path. In the free religious tradition, we are transformed not by marching in lockstep with one another but by listening to the voices of others and the still, small voice within and by acting as we are called to do.

Often, religious communities and institutions are limited by their inability to imagine growth and transformation as a spiral path rather than one that is strictly linear. When the expectation is that we are on a straight and narrow path that leads in just one direction and that our worth and value can be measured by how far we have progressed on that very particular path, then we are on a death march. Little if any meaningful growth takes place in a straight line.

So, the challenge becomes reimagining the course of religious transformation, not as a mere linear progression, but as a spiraling orbit. Rainer Maria Rilke provides an astoundingly rich metaphor for the path of religious discernment and transformation:

I live my life in growing orbits
Which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon,
or a storm, or a great song.

Introduction to Religious Transformation

My intention in creating this blog is to do some thinking and sharing about the nature of religious transformation in our time. If religion is that which binds us together and transformation is a dramatic or thorough change in form, then religious transformation is a term that describes at least three separate but related phenomena:

·         First, in religious community, the fact of being bound together by a shared covenant, with free and open discourse and discernment, changes us each in dramatic ways. In other words, what transpires between and among us in authentic religious community is bound to change each of us—and change us in ways, both large and small, that we cannot possibly predict beforehand.

·         Second, religious transformation suggests that in order to stay bound together in any meaningful way, our congregations and other religious organizations and institutions must exist in a state of perpetual change.  Maintaining the status quo is not a religious undertaking. On the contrary, transformation is the only option for religious institutions if they wish to thrive.

·         Third, religious transformation inevitably expresses itself as movement outward toward change in the larger community and the world. Real and meaningful religious transformation is undergirded by a vow to that which is larger than just those few gathered together and compels us to work to fulfill a specific mission both within and beyond our walls.

All three of these ideas center on this notion that the very things that bind us together will (and must) change us and change themselves and lead individuals and institutions toward changing the world.

Many religious organizations and communities are failing in one or more of these three areas: individuals are not being meaningfully transformed, the organizations themselves have stagnated and resist changes at all costs, and these communities are not acting upon a larger vow in any important way.

Although I am writing from the perspective of a Unitarian Universalist minister, I believe that the challenge of religious transformation is one that must be engaged by any religious institution that aspires to be something beyond a social club or support group or narrow advocacy organization. All three of those undertakings I just named are worthwhile and important endeavors, but they are not necessarily religious.

When Jesus said: “Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 20:24), he was providing an apt metaphor for religious transformation on all levels.

Bearing fruit requires a kind of death, a dramatic change that must occur not just once but again and again. Our former selves must die, our old ways of being with one another must pass away, our failed ways of

engaging with the world must perish. It is only in this way that we can live into the great promise of religious transformation.

In upcoming posts, I will dig a bit deeper into each of the points I made above and will explore some of the underpinnings and implications of religious transformation in our era.