Journal of Sacred Work

Today's meditation was written by Cathy Self,Senior Vice President for the Baptist Healing Trust.

"If you approach people with trust and affection you would have tenfold trust and thousandfold affection returned to you." – Gandhi

  This time of year seems to abound in opportunities for compassionate presence – compelling needs are brought into our homes and workplaces on a daily basis. The familiar red kettle calls to us to give. Angel trees have appeared at every mall, chain store, and even gasoline stations. It's hard to act selfishly this time of year. But our nature is selfish, and we return to its dark shadows all too easily – perhaps out of habit, or because we seek what is familiar or feels safe and reasonable. Or maybe the compelling needs before us seem so overwhelming we believe we must shut them out lest they overburden our hearts and spirits. Our nature seems to draw us back in again and again, whether from selfishness or fear. And if we pay attention that selfishness or fear doesn't feel good. Yet we still retreat, acting in ways that seem rude, heartless, cold. In society, and even in our places of caregiving, compassionate presence seems to have become a premium, even at this time of year.

The call of Love, of compassionate presence, nonetheless asks our awareness to those feelings of discomfort – because it is from there that we can let our heart intelligence guide us into alignment between what we say and how we live. Nice words, and hard to do, especially when life's waves roll over and over and over again.

The word "compassion" from its Latin roots means "to suffer with." True compassion actually feels the suffering of others. In awakened awareness, as described by author Catherine Ingram, "there is no reassuring story that allows distancing from this suffering….it does not look away, not does it rely on beliefs for an escape from feeling." Compassion asks that we take on, take in, embody the suffering of another without falling into abject misery ourselves. As caregivers in particular I think compassion has to "start at home." That is, if we are to offer to enter into compassion with another we must first be able to enter into compassion with ourselves.

Love offers us a portal into that sacred place where we can sit with ourselves with great compassion for all that is and is not.  From that place of felt empathy we are more likely to begin to experience a sense of wholeness. Our relationships then become primarily about appreciation, about considering what best for those we love and serve without wondering how an action or word will affect me. Ingram says it this way: "Because we enjoy what comes and are able to let go what goes, our need for anything to go a particular way diminishes greatly."

According to Ingram, Buddha spoke about three kinds of giving: beggarly giving, friendly giving, and kingly giving."Beggarly giving is when we give the least of what we have, what we don't really need or wouldn't really miss. Friendly giving is when we give what we use and like – perhaps not our best – but what we can afford and might appreciate in return. Kingly giving is when we give the very best of what we have, when we give more than we keep for ourselves or seems we can afford, when we give with no expectation of reciprocity. The paradox is that in kingly giving we enter into compassionate presence – giving because of joy of generosity – of Love – and which far exceeds any other satisfaction possibly gained.

When we are at our worst, when we have the least the give, and when from a Servant's heart comes kingly giving, Love becomes visible. How different would our world be if we practiced kingly giving of compassionate presence? My guess is that we would truly experience healing in every encounter as a sacred encounter like that of the father and prodigal son pictured above. As Emerson wrote, "Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or to think without embracing both." All that is left for us, then, is to fully live Love. May you be recipients of and kingly givers of Love.