58 Love and Compassion
It’s a curious thing that so many people, whether children or adult, make themselves the less loveable in one way or another, the more they feel the want of a loving relationship. They end up of course perpetuating the very thing they wish to escape from, and at such times it needs someone who can see and call forth their potential for love, even in the midst of their darkness. The temptation is always to act in a lazy way, to try and buy off the demand that is being made, but it is only when one is prepared to enter into relationship with the unlovable, with the ugly and deformed, that there can be any chance of transformation.
It may take a longer or a shorter time, but I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t been able to respond positively to a truly loving relationship, but that can only happen when we do what the Lord calls us to do, which is to love our enemies – even while they are still ‘enemies’ – for every enemy is a potential friend and teacher if one is open to it. It’s really the power of the Holy Spirit that takes us beyond pleasure and pain in order to find Christ present even in the most hidden and dark places, but that seeing in itself calls forth the reality, for the presence of God in the world cannot be resisted, and love is that presence.
True communion is possible in such circumstances only when there is true compassion, and there is only compassion when one has seen one’s own darkness and has seen God’s power to transform at work in oneself, but then one can meet another on the same level and without barriers. Only when one knows one’s own poverty can there be true compassion, but in a world of greed and ambition who is interested in poverty? We may be interested in serving the poor, but we are not interested in discovering our own poverty, and I see so often that service becomes a way in which others become rich, materially or spiritually, and in this richness our own poverty is covered up for a time, and we remain on the surface, pleased with ourselves and the name we have acquired, and once again we have managed to separate ourselves, to isolate ourselves, and have prevented the birth of love. It is not a matter of giving up anything or of becoming poor – which are simply the privileged thoughts of the spiritually rich – but just being prepared to recognise our own poverty without reaction, without seeking to avoid it, and it’s only when all denial has come to an end that the truth will be born in our lives, but that is the truth that sets free. In the poverty of the silence of meditation, there truth is born, and freedom and joy, and out of that it is possible that there will be compassion and that will be an action that is not a reaction.