What is compassionate love, in the religious context?
It is about feeling with someone, rather than just for them. You try to put yourself in their shoes, to enter into their situation. It comes from your intestines.
Biblically, it comes from the desire to try to do something to change the situation that invoked your compassion in the first place. Almost always the person you feel compassionate about would have been in difficult straits, maybe dire straits. In the gospel it is often someone who is blind, deaf or dumb, and Jesus spends days with them and is moved to feel compassion for them.
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You seem to be saying it is all about empathy.
Yes, in the sense of being able to stand side by side with them. But it transcends empathy. Compassion is not just a static thing. It is dynamic. You don鈥檛 just feel it and luxuriate in the feeling. You are moved by your compassion. It must impel you to do something to try to change the situation that provoked it.
We use it more generally too. For example, you may see someone who has been hard done by at the hand of another, and you may not be able to change their situation, but your compassion still goes out to the victim, and you can try to stand side by side with them.
Is everyone capable of feeling this dynamic compassion?
I would have thought it was part of what it means to be human. That doesn鈥檛 mean everyone can feel it to the same intensity. Some feel it more easily than others. But I think we are all capable of it.
How do religious people enhance their capacity for feeling compassion?
They would engage in a deepening of their relationship with God, because all that is good in us is a reflection of the divine. As we grow in intimacy with God and so become more God-like ourselves, we will begin to reflect those attributes. It is why we say, 鈥淏e compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate.鈥�
As you grow closer to God, you become more aware of God鈥檚 concern for the other. You realise that this spirituality is not a lonely journey. It is about growing in a relationship with a community. You then realise that your own humanity depends on that of the other. In Genesis God makes it clear to Adam that it is not good for him to be alone.
You have spoken of the African concept of 鈥渦buntu鈥�, that 鈥渁 person is a person through other persons鈥�. Is this key to compassion?
鈥淵ou are human because of your relationships. I am because you are鈥�
This is the idea that you cannot be human in isolation. A solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. You are human precisely because of relationships; you are a relational being or you are nothing. I am because you are. As you grow in your relationship with God, you find this has repercussions on your relationships with others. Hence the two fundamental laws in Christianity: love God and love your neighbour.
In your work on reconciliation in South Africa and Northern Ireland, you encourage victims and perpetrators to talk about their own suffering in order to encourage feelings of compassion. Why is this important?
The word compassion means 鈥渟uffering with鈥�. You want to enter into the other鈥檚 pain, their anguish, passion and suffering. In my reconciliation meetings, when the perpetrator talked about his own upbringing in a deprived and poor home, the victim who was listening to them was almost always affected. We had one case in Northern Ireland where the victim said that if he had been brought up in the circumstances in which the perpetrator had been, he was certain he too would have done what this guy did. It is about trying to get someone to understand how the other turned out to be who they are.
