Mercy Mirror

Concern is often our response to suffering’s blow.  “I feel so much compassion for the Syrian refugees,” we murmur, and we mean it.  Or, “I feel so badly for you” when confronted with a friend’s struggle, pain, or loss.

That’s very nice.  But something else may be more important than the feeling part, which is, after all, more about us than them.

I’m talking about about acting out compassion, freely offering our physical, emotional, and intuitive selves (and perhaps also our resources) without reservation. Co-experiencing.  Connecting.  Getting-under-the-skin-of-the-other-person.  Being vulnerable enough to voluntarily share their dark pit.  After all, only when we’re actually in that bleak place can we be genuinely helpful in supporting the overthrow of the drooling gremlins that have staked their claim there.

It seems more popular to espouse a compassionate ideology than to practice it these days. We often talk a good line, but less frequently live it. Real compassion, however, is active and powerful, an agent of change and renewal. 

I am grateful for a daughter who gets this.  Recently I was overwhelmed by a certain bogeyman (a bugaboo of advancing age, I suppose) that momentarily strangled my deep heart and soul - AND injected a mega dose of inadequacy.  And yet this adult child, who is half my age, stepped right smack dab into the moment to make a difference.  Compassion shone from her eyes.  She spoke it, delivered it through her hands that touched me gently, knowingly.

Someone else might have pooh-poohed the whole mess and suggested I “snap out of it” and stop making such a big deal out of such small stuff (which admittedly, in the big picture, it was). But she mercifully offered kindness, the antedote that helped break the spell much more effectively than logic. 

I soaked up her provision like a thirsty, wilted flower. And now, some days later, she continues to graciously support and uphold me as I walk away from my earlier discouragement with fresh perspective.  She has been an agent of healing, a human mirror of divine mercy. I am grateful.

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“Ever let mercy outweigh all else in you. Let our compassion be a mirror where we may see in ourselves that likeness and that true image which belong to the Divine nature and Divine essence…”

— St. Isaac of Syria