Compassion, Justice -- the Via Transformativa
©March 1998 Sea Raven
My class notes on Meister Eckhart's Sermon 2 include a comment from Matthew Fox to the effect that "the New Age is afraid of Darkness -- as was the Enlightenment." The reason for that, Fox went on, is that there is no room for hope in anthropocentrism. Entertainment numbs our postmodern despair. Why are some of us desperate? Most people in this postmodern time have no leaders, no authority, no answers. The old cosmologies are irrelevant, and the new ones suspect. There is no ground upon which to base our lives, and no confidence that we will be able to find the truth within ourselves. The "new age" shrouds itself in light and pops pills, thinking the Mothership waits behind the comet. Meanwhile, back on earth, war, famine, disease, and death manifest denied via negativa among the human population. "What we resist persists," Werner Erhart said, 20 years ago. We think we can win through to wholeness without embracing the darkness.
But Fox's commentary on Sermon 2 (Breakthrough, page 71 ( 1 ) is "a direct affront to the addictive [New Age] society."
The deep word of God can only be spoken to a person with an Inner self. And when it is spoken, unity takes place, for barriers of ego and time, competition and dualism, only exist at the level of superficiality or the outer person's consciousness. ... We are also most together -- at one with the Creator and in the process of becoming a truer and truer image of God and at one with our neighbor [regardless] of sex, race, or nation.
This is the place where Compassion is born, not the Compassion that our language confuses with pity or condescension, but as defined and discussed in Sermon 30. Compassion "directs a person to relationships with his fellow human beings." Fox's commentary enhances our understanding to include justice -- the work of the via transformativa. "Compassion," Fox said in class, "is the land of milk and honey, heaven, where humanity and divinity come together. It is realized eschatology."
In 1990, Jenifer Casolo, who was accused of having an arms cache buried in her backyard in San Salvador, presented testimony at American University in Washington, D.C. shortly after she was released from prison. She was among thousands arrested in the Salvadoran government's crackdown after the final FMLN push of November 1989, which ultimately resulted in the 1992 peace accords that settled the conflict. She told a very typical story about suffering, redemption, and resurrection. The story is typical because it is told by all those who come through the via negativa and discover the soul's work of Compassion. Here is what she had to say about suffering and redemption:
Suffering, I told my interrogator, is not the worst thing you can do. Being cruel is a lot worse. And I said thank you. I understand now that my life is not my own. In two years I have learned this lesson: that what God requires of us is to transcend ourselves for those we love. ... And I have never been able to live it until this one moment. I understand. And I understand the hope of your people. Thank you. You have freed me.
... Hope. That each one of us can live a life that proclaims life... because we have witnessed people who have claimed their own dignity, no Foxer what the cost. And you know that they can put up with anything ...
In the Commentary to Sermon 30 (pp. 434-435) Fox discusses Eckhart's theology of experiences such as Jenifer Casolo's:
... Because Jesus taught us what compassion means, he also taught us what salvation means. It means to be compassionate, which means to enter into the fullness of the blessing that all creation is and to work to pass creation on as a blessing ...
Jenifer Casolo found relationship with her interrogator, which allowed her to react with compassion and to realize that the suffering he brought upon himself by causing her suffering was worse than her own. With that realization, she found freedom and therefore salvation. For me, the most profound statement of the meaning of salvation is at the end of Paul's Letter to the Romans, Chapter 8:38-39: "For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." This is the description of relationship with God that breeds compassion in the depths of the soul. Salvation springs from freedom. Suffering is redeemed by freedom. Nicodemus can only be born again in freedom. John 3:1-12.
But there can be no shortcuts. Governments, administrators, religious leaders, anyone who wields power over others, who claims that suffering is ipso facto "redemptive" keeps injustice firmly in place, and imprisons the soul. Likewise, no rule can be formulated that will produce the experience that transformed Jenifer Casolo's life. Religious people have the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, the book of Leviticus, the Sermon on the Mount, the cumulative teachings of Zen masters -- and none of it can substitute for the journey inward to find the Inner Self where "the deep word of God can be spoken." The truth believed, i.e., universal truth reduced to a belief system, is a lie and a spiritual rip-off because it too keeps injustice firmly in place and invalidates the soul. This is the nature of fundamentalism.
Christ not only taught compassion, he did compassionate works of healing and relief of people's pain. ... We too are to do the works that Jesus did. ... The most basic work of compassion is justice, or, if you prefer, the relief of injustice. For without justice there can be no compassion, no love of neighbor that is also love of God, no love of God that is also love of neighbor. ... The promise, Eckhart points out, is one of healing. Your entire life will be called healed, he suggests, when you have entered into compassion and its works of justice. ...
Since compassion also boasts a mystical side -- that of our relation to all of the cosmos and its origins and goal in compassion -- Eckhart invokes as a summary of his teaching on compassion the psalmist, who sings: "Justice and peace have kissed." Ps. 85:10.
We need to trust ourselves in order to trust the cosmos and to trust others .. It is the love and compassion toward ourselves that we will project onto others. ... We learn compassion even from the relationship of soul and body. We will never learn it if we fall into dualistic battles of body warring against soul.
Passion ... is to be put to the service of our decision-making and commitments ... instruments of our transformation.
Our American society is bereft of this understanding, whether we look to commerce, education, government, or religion. Very few are teaching or learning compassion.
Yet, the Willing Sacrifice is one of the most powerful universal archetypes of human consciousness. The Fisher King, who suffers for the land, and is rescued by the one who finds the Grail, and thereby takes his place is one of the foundation myths of human life. Jesus is the incarnation of this myth for Christians. Every time one of us discovers the truth that creativity gestates in the dark, the legend is reborn, Jesus comes again. The problem is that we cannot experience this until we let go of the fear of the journey through the darkness.
This letting go is the rest of the work of Compassion that Eckhart discusses. There can be no Compassion, no justice, so long as we hold on to what Eckhart calls "passion." He says, "We should be very much on the alert lest the force of passion dominate our actions. ... The fool here is sensuality or passion. It is called foolish ... both because it is not susceptible of discipline and because it clouds over the light of wisdom. ...
This means being attached or giving the greatest importance to things -- the "merchant mentality," which Eckhart discusses in Sermon 32. The consumer society we live in holds shopping as the greatest sacrament. To impede commerce is equated with obstructing justice; success means to have it all, not to give it all away.
"The intention must be simple so that we seek nothing in addition to God and nothing except God...." This is the antidote to unbridled, undisciplined life that seeks only its own comfort. In the spaciousness of the soul, God and Justice, Jesus and Compassion, my neighbor, myself, and my enemy are all One. Jenifer Casolo could say that her interrogator freed her, because she saw his suffering instead of her own. She saw that when he caused suffering to another, he suffered even more himself, and that knowledge opened her to experience Compassion/Justice even for her enemy. "And he wrote my confession: Jenifer, age, name, all that information, does not know anything about the weapons. She is innocent. She has the right to have a lawyer, etc. etc. He let me read it, and I signed it ..."
Jenifer's story has a happy ending to the extent that she was allowed to return to the States and start another life. But she left behind friends, loved companions, a people, and a country, as have refugees, political prisoners, and prisoners of war from all over the globe. Taking a stand for justice has a price. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it The Cost and Joy of Discipleship.
NOTES
1. Breakthrough, Matthew Fox, Image Books, 1980 Return to text