Tenderness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The harsh conditions inflicted on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War gave birth to the conditions that helped to bring Adolf Hitler to power. We need to find a way to ensure that all peoples enjoy the treatment that we wish for ourselves. There is much talk of the need for dialogue as a way of improving international relations. But will it be Socratic or an aggressive dialogue that seeks to humiliate, manipulate, or defeat? Are we prepared to “make place for the other,” or are we determined simply to impose our own will? An essential part of this dialogue must be the effort to listen . We have to make a more serious effort to hear one another’s narratives. All too often, when the enemy starts to tell his story, the other side interrupts, shouts him down, objects, and denounces it as false and inaccurate. But like any mythos, a story often reflects the inner meaning of an event rather than factual, historical accuracy. As any psychoanalyst knows, stories of pain, betrayal, and atrocity give expression to the emotional dimension of an episode, which is just as important to the speaker as what actually happened. We need to listen to the undercurrent of pain in our enemy’s story. And we should be aware as well that our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We have to try to look carefully and deeply into our own hearts and thus learn to see the sorrow of our enemy. The Greeks were a warlike people, but they understood this. The first of their great tragic dramas to survive was Aeschylus’s The Persians , which was presented on the festival of Dionysus in 472 BCE, just eight years after Athens had defeated the Persian army in the landmark battle of Salamis. But before the Athenian victory, the Persians had rampaged through Athens, pillaging, burning, and trashing the city and obliterating all the beautiful new temples on the Acropolis. Yet in his drama, Aeschylus asks the audience to weep for the Persians and asks them to see Salamis from the enemy’s point of view. Xerxes, the defeated Persian general, his mother, Atossa, and the ghost of the late Persian king Darius are all treated with sympathy and respect. All speak of the piercing sorrow of bereavement, which has stripped away the veneer of security to reveal the terror that lies at the heart of human life. In the spirit of the Daodejing , there is no triumphalism and no gloating.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I went with them to a consultation at the plastic surgeon’s office. We didn’t mention that we’d been together for only seven months. I sat in the waiting room while Ash was in surgery, then brought them to my house to recover. When June joined us the following day, she and I promptly came down with fevers, and the three of us spent the weekend at various degrees of supine, lined up against the headboard of the bed like a display of broken-down dolls. I was exhausted; it was too much. I was angry at myself for taking this on a week after our divorce. I should have let Ash recuperate at their own apartment. But then there would be moments. June was fascinated by the surgical drains, the grenade-shaped bulbs that hung from skinny plastic tubes draped over Ash’s shoulders. She wanted to watch Ash empty them, an event that sent me hiding in the living room. Why did you have your boobs taken off, again? I heard June’s voice from the bathroom. We’d talked casually with her, a few times, about how some people are boys, and some people are girls, and some people don’t really feel like either, and some people feel like both. Well, replied Ash, having boobs just didn’t seem like me. Have you ever put on a shirt, or maybe pants, that didn’t feel like “you”? And that you wanted to take off, because you didn’t like how you felt in them? I sat on the sofa and grinned, listened to them chitchat like old friends. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] One morning I left early to teach a workshop. June was kneeling on the floor in front of the kitchen cabinets, pulling out a ziplock baggie to fill with coins she’d been collecting. She and Ash were going on an adventure: the pancake house, then the zoo. June was excited to buy something from the gift shop with her money. Later in the afternoon, we’d work in the yard, and I’d water Fairy Meadow, June’s name for the still-bare patch of dirt where the sewer guys had dug to access the line. We’d scattered some wildflower seeds there, though I realized as we did it that I hadn’t prepared the soil. We were dumping seeds on dry, baked dirt. But June was very protective of Fairy Meadow and didn’t want anyone to step on it, not even the dog. Sometimes when she was asleep I wanted to go outside in secret, work the soil properly, and replant it, make it all work out for her. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I thought often about what I wanted June to learn or take away, if anything, from those months. I remember thinking once that the most important thing I wanted was for her to understand what it meant to empathize, to be truly kind. Then I changed my mind; that wasn’t quite it.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  By looking into their own hearts, critically observing their behavior, and taking note of their own reactions to pain and joy, these sages found a way to order social relations. 45 A ruler could bring peace and order to society only if he had mastered his own primitive instincts. The rituals, Xunzi believed, had been inspired by the sages’ analysis of humanity; they had shaped the basic emotions engendered by our brain, just as an artist skillfully brought form and beauty out of unpromising material: they “trim what is too long, and stretch out what is too short, eliminate surplus and repair deficiency, extend the forms of love and reverence, and step by step, bring to fulfilment the beauties of proper conduct.” 46 Even the stars, the planets, and the four seasons had to “yield” to one another to bring order out of potential chaos. 47 So far from being unnatural, the li would bring a practitioner into alliance with the way things are and into the heart of reality. The three monotheistic religions also stressed the importance of compassion. Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, the form of faith practiced by most Jews today, both developed during a period of warfare and economic exploitation. The Jewish uprising against the Roman occupation of Judaea resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Roman army in 70 CE. Hitherto there had been no single Jewish orthodoxy; the period leading up to the catastrophe of 70 had been characterized by a rich religious diversity and a multitude of competing sects, all of which claimed to be the true Judaism and all preoccupied with the status and rituals of the temple. After the destruction of that temple, only two of these sects—the Jesus movement and Pharisaism —were able to survive. Building on the insights of the Pharisees, the rabbis of the Talmudic age were able to transform Judaism from a temple faith into a religion of the book. Hitherto the study of the Torah (the teachings and laws attributed to Moses) had been a minority pursuit; now it would replace temple worship. In the course of a massively creative intellectual effort, the rabbis composed new scriptures: the Mishnah, completed in about 200 CE, and the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, completed in the fifth and sixth centuries respectively. Compassion was central to their vision, as we see in a famous story attributed to the great sage Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus’s. It is said that a pagan approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if he could recite the entire Torah while he stood on one leg. Hillel replied: “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Arguing with the consummate logic that Athenians were developing in their democratic assemblies, she raises one objection to her hideous plan after another, only to reach a terrifying conclusion: she cannot punish Jason as he deserves unless she also murders their boys. She is too intelligent not to find the most effective means of revenge and too tough not to carry it out. 3 If it is not tempered by compassion and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. But it was also true, as Aristotle (384–322 BCE) would claim later, that the exercise of our rational powers was essential to the empathetic experience of tragic drama. Without the detached critical rigor that enabled you to stand back from the reptilian me-first mentality, you would be unable to escape from your self-preoccupation and appreciate the plight of another person. Tragedy, Aristotle believed, educated the emotions and taught people to experience them appropriately. As he watched the drama unfold, a small-minded person would see his own troubles in perspective and an arrogant person would learn to feel compassion for the unfortunate. Purified, drained of their dangerous potential, the emotions could thus become beneficial to the community. 4 We are a tragic species, divided against ourselves, our two brains locked in conflict. As they learned to identify with the suffering hero, the Greek audience found themselves weeping for people they might otherwise shun—for Medea or for Heracles, who in a fit of divinely inspired madness killed his wife and children. At the end of Euripides’ Heracles, Theseus, legendary king of Athens, embraces the broken man and leads him gently offstage, the two bound together “in a yoke of friendship.” As they bid him farewell, the chorus laments Heracles’ fate “with mourning and with many tears ... For we today have lost our noblest friend.” 5 The art of the dramatist enabled the audience to achieve an expansion of sympathy, so that they had a taste of the “immeasurable” power of compassion. An audience that could befriend a man who had committed an act like that of Heracles had achieved a Dionysian ekstasis, a “stepping out” of ingrained preconceptions in an empathy that, before seeing the play, they would probably have deemed impossible. In 430, at one of the darkest moments of the senseless and destructive Peloponnesian War, Sophocles (c. 496–405 BCE) presented his tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant to the people of Athens. When reason failed, it was still possible for human beings to learn from their pain. Renowned for his clear-sighted wisdom, Oedipus proved fatally, tragically ignorant. To his horror, he discovers that not only has he unwittingly slain his father, but also, unaware of her true identity, that he has married his mother.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  4. A Roman sarcophagus (second century CE) for the boy Marcus Cornelius Statius shows in strip-cartoon fashion his parents gazing fondly on the infant Marcus, and then his father cuddling him. Later scenes show the older Marcus with pony and chariot and at his lessons. Classical literary sources are less extensive on contraception than on abortifacients, of which many Graeco-Roman authors disapproved (the Hebrew Bible never discusses the issue), and there was still more discussion of what was, clearly, a widespread practice: the exposure of unwanted infants. Exposure was a father’s legal right in most Graeco-Roman legal systems until the adoption of Christianity by Roman emperors in the fourth century. Its outlawing in Roman law at that period was a significant turning point. Nevertheless, whatever the legal and theological framework, Christian societies up to modern times have in practice been little different from others in turning to this desperate expedient where poverty is the norm, even if it is less obviously a simple favouring of male infants over female in feeding and general care. Such are the limits of the rhetoric of marital love and family, in the Roman Empire as much as in other eras. [41] The Romans had the whole Mediterranean at their disposal by the late first century BCE, but more than two centuries went by before they made any official attempt to suppress polygyny and its supporting legal systems among their subject peoples. That was in accordance with the normal Roman strategy of not interfering with subject peoples unless absolutely necessary. A shift occurred in the early third century CE, as a necessary side-effect of the Emperor Caracalla granting Roman citizenship to all free imperial subjects in 212 (he took this sweeping initiative largely to extend his available revenue-raising base). Universal citizenship gave an incentive for a great many more people to settle marital disputes in the imperial law courts, where Roman law was of course based on the principle of monogamy. When Roman officialdom did actively intervene on questions of marriage law, the interventions were naturally aimed at safeguarding monogamy rather than paying much attention to polygyny; that meant dealing with incest. The Romans had firm views about what they regarded as incest, particularly marriages between uncle and niece; the Emperor Claudius had caused great offence by doing precisely that, though the law grudgingly accommodated him. This imperial exception aside, Roman law contains repeated prohibitions on matters of incest. Romans had a particular prejudice against the widespread west Asian custom of close-kin marriage, and they would, for instance, have found abhorrent Judaism’s provision for a brother to marry his deceased brother’s widow, so-called levirate marriage. [42] They were especially horrified by one variant on close-kin marriage – the Egyptian custom of brother and sister marrying. It is mysterious why this ancient practice (rare in world history) spread so vigorously in Egypt during the early Roman imperial era. Previously it had been confined to the elite around the Pharaohs, but, far from disappearing with the Ptolemaic dynasty, it spread through society and comprised around a fifth of all Egyptian marriages in the first to third centuries CE. [43] It is clear that Caracalla’s decree did not do much to change west Asian marital customs among the multitudes of new Roman citizens, and eight decades later, in 295, the co-emperors Diocletian and Maximian tried to remedy that with a general imperial decree against incestuous marriages. Egyptian custom was prominent in their targets: they numbered among offenders those who married ‘a sister on the father’s side, or on the mother’s side’ in addition to straightforward marriages of siblings. These two emperors were historically among the greatest Roman foes of Christianity, but they presented their action with elaborate reference to morality, in the shape of the opinions likely to be held by the pantheon of Roman gods: ‘even the immortal gods themselves will be favorable and gentle to the Roman name, as they always have been, if they have seen that all people living under our rule lead a wholly pious and religious and peaceful and chaste life in all respects.’ [44] In later years, Christianized Roman emperors did repeat incest bans, this time in the name of the Christian God, but, before Diocletian and Maximian, Christian writers had proved oddly silent about ‘the Egyptian problem’ amid other zestful attacks on examples of pagan immorality, including pagan incest. [45] Diocletian and Maximian were making their pronouncements in a period when imperial religion was acquiring a new moral aspect, in parallel to what was happening in Christian moral discourse. Yet their rhetoric was nothing like the overarching narrative tragedy shaping Israelite history from the prophets onwards, which threatened Judaism with extinction and underlay its praise of matrimony and its condemnation of every other sexual practice. We

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  silvery radiance around her. She was carrying a large bunch of rust-colored chrysanthemums in the crook of her right arm, and when we had walked side by side across the yard without a word and were standing in the doorway, she raised her free hand and put the hair back from my forehead, as if she knew, in this one gesture, that she had the gift of being remembered. Yes, I can still see Adela, said Austerlitz; in my mind she has remained unchanged, as beautiful as she was then. At the end of those long summer days we quite often played badminton together in the ballroom of Andromeda Lodge, which had been empty since the war, while Gerald fed and watered his pigeons before night fell. The feathered shuttlecock flew between us as we struck it back and forth. The trajectory it followed, always turning on its way although you could not have said how, was a streak of white drawn through the evening hour, and I could have sworn that Adela often hovered in the air just above the parquet floor for much longer than the force of gravity allowed. After our game we usually stayed in the ballroom for a little while, looking at the images cast on the wall opposite the tall, arched window by the last rays of the sun shining low through the moving branches of a hawthorn, until at last they were extinguished. There was something fleeting, evanescent about those sparse patterns appearing in constant succession on the pale surface, something which never went beyond the moment of its generation, so to speak, yet here, in this intertwining of sunlight and shadow always forming and re-forming, you could see mountainous landscapes with glaciers and ice fields, high plateaux, steppes, deserts, fields full of flowers, islands in the sea, coral reefs, archipelagoes and atolls, forests bending to the storm, quaking grass and drifting smoke. And once, I remember, said Austerlitz, as we gazed together at this slowly fading world, Adela leaned towards me and asked: Do you see the fronds of the palm trees, do you see the caravan coming through the dunes over there? By the time Austerlitz repeated this question of Adela’s, a question still imprinted on his memory, we were on our way back into the city from Greenwich. Our taxi made slow progress in the dense evening traffic. It had begun to rain; the beams of headlights gleamed on the asphalt, cutting through the windscreen covered with silvery beads. It took us nearly an hour to travel a distance of not much more than three miles to Tower Bridge by way of Greek Street, Evelyn Street, Lower Road, and Jamaica Road. Austerlitz leaned back with his arms round his rucksack, staring ahead in silence. Perhaps he had closed his eyes, I thought, but I did not venture to glance sideways at him. Only at Liverpool Street Station, where he waited with me in McDonald’s until my train left, and after a casual remark about the glaring light which, so he said, allowed not even the hint of a shadow and perpetuated the momentary terror of a lightning flash—only at Liverpool Street did he resume his story. I never saw

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Men were urged to accept their responsibilities, to work hard, to serve their wives and families, to eschew alcohol, gambling, and pornography, to step up around the home, and to be present in their children’s lives. The notion of “servant leadership” had originated in the business world. With the decline of production in the 1970s and 1980s, service work took over a larger share of the labor market, and servant leadership helped redefine masculine authority in a way that didn’t conflict with men’s role in a service economy. No longer producers in a traditional sense, men could still be leaders. Within Christian circles, the concept of servant leadership similarly enabled men to maintain their authority in the home even as they no longer maintained breadwinner status. By the 1990s, the male breadwinner economy was largely a thing of the past. Since the 1960s, male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing, and agriculture had been in decline, shrinking from approximately half of the workforce to less than 30 percent at the end of the 1990s. Over that same period, sectors that employed pink-and white-collar women—areas such as health care, retail, education, finance, and food service—expanded to well over half of the workforce; by 1994, 75 percent of working-age women worked for pay. Despite their rhetoric, evangelicals were not immune to these economic trends; among conservative Protestants, rates of dual-income households began to approach the national average. Nevertheless, women who worked outside the home still shouldered the burden of housework, and for some of these women, “servant leadership” appeared to offer a way to incentivize men to reinvest on the home front.7 For women who found this patriarchal bargain attractive, the harsh critique leveled by feminists was alienating and confusing. Here was a group of men confessing their shortcomings, promising to be better husbands, to be more attentive to their families, more respectful of women. What could be wrong with that? Although studies show that conservative Protestant men did less household labor than men in nonevangelical homes, they were more likely to express affection for their wives and appreciation for the housework women did. They also spent more time than other men with their kids, even if they tended to administer harsher discipline. Moreover, depending on where any given man was coming from, “soft patriarchy” and “servant leadership” might be a significant improvement over harsher authoritarian tendencies, whether religious or secular in origin. In some families, these concepts functioned in a way that could “reform machismo” by reattaching men to their families.8 Despite talk of sacrifice, tenderness, and servanthood, however, it was hard to ignore language like that of Tony Evans in Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper , the organization’s best-selling book.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  61 Like the rabbis, he believed that the commandments to love God with your whole heart and soul and your neighbor as yourself were the most exalted commandments of the Torah. 62 The gospels show him practicing “concern for everybody,” reaching out to “sinners”: prostitutes, lepers, epileptics, and those denounced as traitors for collecting the Roman taxes. His followers should refrain from judging others. 63 The people admitted to the Kingdom of God, in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table, were those who practiced deeds of loving kindness, feeding the hungry and visiting those who were sick or in prison. 64 His most devoted disciples must give all their possessions to the poor. 65 Jesus is also presented as a man of ahimsa. “You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth,” he told the crowds. “But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well.” 66 You have heard how it was said; you must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good and his rain to fall on honest men alike. For if you love those who love you, how can you claim any credit? Even the tax-collectors and the pagans do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? You must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect. 67 Like the rabbis, Jesus brought the compassionate message of scripture to the fore by giving a more stringently empathetic twist to an ancient text. Here he comes close to the Buddhist ideal of upeksha, “equanimity.” His followers would offer kindness where there was little hope of any return. Saint Paul, the earliest extant Christian writer, quoting an early Christian hymn, presents Jesus as a bodhisattva figure who refused to cling to the high status befitting one made in God’s image and lived as the servant of suffering humanity. 68 Christians should do the same: “Everybody is to be self- effacing,” Paul insisted. “Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead.” 69 Compassion was the test of true spirituality: If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything, and if I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but without love, then I am nothing at all.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  When we cling to our certainties, likes, and dislikes, deeming them essential to our sense of self, we alienate ourselves from the “great transformation” of the Way, because the reality is that we are all in continual flux, moving from one state to another. An unenlightened person, Zhuangzi explained, is like a frog in a well who mistakes the tiny patch of sky he can see for the whole; but once he has seen the sky’s immensity, his perspective is changed forever.9 If we are determined to remain trapped in our current perspective, our understanding remains “small … cramped and busy.” But the sage, who has left the ego behind, has achieved what Zhuangzi called the “Great Knowledge,” which is “broad and unhurried.”10 You arrive at this only when you learn to “sit quietly and forget” one thing after another until finally you forget about yourself. Your heart will then be “empty” of bustling self-importance and, without the distorting lens of selfishness, it will reflect other things and people like a mirror.11 This “emptiness” leads naturally to empathy. “The perfect man has no self,” Zhuangzi explained.12 Once he has lost the belief that he is special and particular, he regards all other people as “I.” “People cry, so he cries—he considers everything as his own being.”13 Zhuangzi was a hermit, and his views were sometimes deliberately expressed in an extreme form to shock his listeners into fresh insights, but he resembled Socrates in his insistence that we should hold aloof from the opinionated ego. His art of forgetting is close to the “science of compassion” I described earlier, with its discipline of emptying the mind of culturally conditioned preconceptions in order to “make place for the other.” If our view of others is perpetually clouded by our own prejudices, opinions, needs, and desires, we will neither understand nor truly respect them. Today unknowing no longer seems obscurantist. As we have seen, so many of the things we once took for granted have proved unreliable that we may have to “forget” old ways of thought in order to meet the current challenges. At the beginning of the twentieth century, physicists believed that there were only a few unresolved problems in the Newtonian system before our knowledge of the universe would be complete. But a mere twenty years later, quantum mechanics exploded old certainties and unveiled a universe that was indeterminate and unknowable. As the American physicist Percy Bridgman (1882–1961) explained: The structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all.… The world fades out and eludes us.… We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible to our minds.14

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  79 To counter the arrogant self-sufficiency of jahiliyyah, Muhammad asked his followers to make an existential “surrender” (islam) of their entire being to Allah, the Compassionate (al-Rahman) and Merciful (al-Rahim), who had given “signs” (ayat) of his benevolence to human beings in all the wonders of the created world. 80 A muslim was a man or woman who had made this surrender of ego. One of the first things Muhammad asked his converts to do was to prostrate themselves in prayer several times a day; it was difficult for Arabs imbued with the haughty jahili spirit to grovel on the ground like a slave, but the posture of their bodies was designed to teach them at a level deeper than the rational that the “surrender” of islam entailed daily transcendence of the preening, prancing ego. Muslims were also required to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor; this zakat (“purification”) would purge their hearts of residual selfishness. At first the religion preached by Muhammad was called tazakkah, an obscure word related to zakat, which means “refinement, generosity, chivalry.” Muslims were to cloak themselves in the virtues of compassion, using their intelligence to contemplate God’s “signs” in nature in order to cultivate a similarly caring and responsible spirit that would make them want to give graciously to all God’s creatures. Because of Allah’s bountiful kindness, there was order and fertility where there could have been chaos and sterility. If they followed this example, they would find that instead of being trapped in the selfish barbarism of jahiliyyah, they would acquire spiritual refinement. Islam is not a pacifist religion; Muhammad had to fight a war of self-defense against the Qurayshi establishment of Mecca, who had vowed to exterminate the Muslim community. Aggression and the preemptive strike were strictly forbidden. Sometimes fighting was necessary to preserve such humane values as religious freedom. 81 But it was always better to forgive and to sit down quietly and reason with your enemy, provided that this dialogue was conducted “in the most kindly manner.” 82 Tragically, Muhammad found that war had its own deadly dynamic; in the desperate struggle, atrocities were committed by both sides. So as soon as the tide turned in his favor, Muhammad adopted a nonviolent policy, riding unarmed with a thousand unarmed Muslims into enemy territory. There, having narrowly escaped being massacred by the Meccan cavalry, he negotiated a treaty with the Quraysh, accepting terms that seemed to his outraged followers to throw away all the advantages they had gained. Yet that evening, the Qur’an declared that this apparent defeat was a “manifest victory.”

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus’s life was the moment when he forgave his executioners, when instead of attempting to defeat evil with evil, he was able to prevail over it with good: “Only goodness can drive out evil and only love can overcome hate.”13 Loving our enemies means that we have to accept “the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury on us.” King was convinced that this was “an absolute necessity for our survival … the key to the solution of the problems of our world.”14 We could not allow the injury our enemies inflict upon us to become an insuperable barrier to a more positive relationship. “We must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding,” King insisted. “Every word and deed must contribute to an understanding with the enemy and release those vast reservoirs of goodwill which have been blocked by the impenetrable walls of hate.”15 But compassion involves risk and makes us vulnerable: King was assassinated in 1968. He knew that hatred was inspired by fear but always remained convinced that only love could cure this “disease”: “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it.”16 Even though King fell victim to hatred, his commitment to compassion changed the world and his memory remains a constant inspiration. The same is true of Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948. After his death, the Indian prime minister Pandit Nehru told his people: The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years, and a thousand years later that light will still be seen in this country, and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts.17 A life that consistently refuses to succumb to the temptation of hatred has an enduring power of its own.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  wanted, you have tortured me to your heart’s content, and now you can go. For heaven’s sake, go!’ On seeing that she was still far from mollified, Ricciardo, who was determined not to leave her until she had recovered her equanimity, set about the task of appeasing her with a stream of honeyed endearments. And he exhorted and cajoled and beseeched her to such good effect that she eventually succumbed and forgave him, after which, by mutual consent, they tarried together at some length to their inordinate delight. And so it was that from that day forward, the lady abandoned the stony attitude she had previously displayed to Ricciardo, and began to love him with all the tenderness in the world. And by proceeding with the greatest of discretion, they enjoyed their love together on many a later occasion. May God grant that we enjoy ours likewise.

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  When shock trauma is the result of an isolated event or series of events and there is no consistent history of previous trauma, I believe that people, in community with family and friends, have a remarkable ability to bring about their own healing. I strongly encourage this practice. I have written this book in relatively non-technical language. It is also for parents, teachers, child care workers, and others who serve as guides and role models for children to be able to give them a gift of incalculable value by helping them immediately resolve their reactions to traumatic events. In addition, doctors, nurses, paramedics, police, fire fighters, rescue workers, and others who work routinely with the victims of accidents and natural disasters will find this information useful, not only for the work that they do with these traumatized individuals, but for themselves. To witness human carnage of any kind, especially on a regular basis, exacts its own toll and is often as traumatic as experiencing the event firsthand. How To Use This Book Give yourself time to absorb the material as you read through the book. Do the exercises suggested in the text. Take it slowly and easily. Trauma is the result of the most powerful drives the human body can produce. It demands respect. You may not hurt yourself by moving through the material quickly or superficially, but you won’t get the same benefit that you would if you take the time to digest the information slowly. If at any time the material or exercises seem disturbing, stop and let things settle. Sit with your experience and see what unfolds. Many of the misconceptions about trauma go surprisingly deep and may affect your experience of as well as your attitude towards yourself. It is important to recognize when this has happened. If you keep a portion of your attention on your reactions to the material, your organism will guide you along at the proper pace. Body sensation, rather than intense emotion, is the key to healing trauma. Be aware of any emotional reaction swelling up inside you, and be aware of how your body is experiencing these emotions in the form of sensations and thoughts. If your emotions feel too intense, i.e., rage, terror, profound helplessness, etc., you need to enlist competent professional help.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  During the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, performed the meditation on the Immeasurables for the soldiers of his country—but he contemplated the plight of the American troops too, and made himself desire their safety and well-being. Once you realize that your enemy is also suffering, you look into his eyes and see a mirror image of your own distress. In this way, you realize that he too deserves compassion. Eventually it became clear to Thich Nhat Hanh that only one course of action was possible: to work to end the war.19 Today some of the Israelis and Palestinians who have lost children in the conflict have come together, their suffering creating a bond that transcends political divisions, in order to work for peace. On the Indian subcontinent, Indians and Pakistanis, shocked by the terrorism they have both experienced, are campaigning together for peace between their countries. It is now time to investigate your enemy, using the “science of compassion” in the same way as you began to get to know your “adopted” foreign nation or tradition during the tenth step. Start with the realization of how little you really know and find out more about the history of your enemy. Again, you may discover that matters are more complex than you supposed. At each point, keep asking “But why?” until you have built up an understanding of the context that gives you an empathetic grasp of your enemy’s situation. We can never condone cruelty, ruthless violence, terrorism, or systemic injustice, but remember that you, your own nation, and your own tradition also have flaws and, in all likelihood, have committed serious crimes against others in the past or, perhaps, even in the present. Is there great suffering in your enemy’s history? Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression. Has this happened to your enemy? Remember also the importance of visiting the “shadow” in your own mind. Perhaps, in different circumstances, you too would be capable of evil actions. Retaliation is likely only to exacerbate the hatred and violence activated by the threat mechanism. On September 11, 2001, for example, there were demonstrations and expressions of sympathy for the United States in countries all over the world, including Palestine and Iran. If there had been a nonviolent and openhanded response to the attacks on the Twin Towers instead of a military offensive, might the outcome have been different? Remember Confucius’s words: if you seek to establish yourself, then seek to establish others. Humiliating the enemy can be dangerous. The harsh conditions inflicted on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War gave birth to the conditions that helped to bring Adolf Hitler to power. We need to find a way to ensure that all peoples enjoy the treatment that we wish for ourselves.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  It is a method—and the only adequate test of any method is to put it into practice. Throughout the centuries, people have found that when they behaved in accordance with the Golden Rule, they experienced a deeper, fuller level of existence, and they have maintained that anybody can achieve this state if she puts her mind to it. But it will be a slow, incremental, and imperceptible process. First, make a resolution to act once every day in accordance with the positive version of the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.” This need not be a grand, dramatic gesture; it can be a “little, nameless, unremembered” act that may seem insignificant to you. Perhaps you make a point of giving an elderly relative a call, help your wife with the chores, or take time to listen to a colleague who is anxious or depressed. Look for an opportunity to create a “spot of time” in somebody’s life, and this awareness will increase as you become more proficient in mindfulness. Second, resolve each day to fulfill the negative version of the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you.” Try to catch yourself before you make that brilliantly wounding remark, asking yourself how you would like to be on the receiving end of such sarcasm—and refrain. Each time you succeed will be an ekstasis, a transcendence of ego. Third, make an effort once a day to change your thought patterns: if you find yourself indulging in a bout of anger or self-pity, try to channel all that negative energy into a more kindly direction. If you are in a rut of resentment, make an effort to think of something for which you know you should be grateful, even if you do not feel it at the time. If you are hurt by an unpleasant remark, remember that your own anger often issues from pain and that the person who spoke to you so unkindly may also be suffering. As you brush your teeth or put the cat out at the end of the day, check to see if you have performed your three actions. Sometimes you will find that you have not done so; sometimes you will remember that, on the contrary, you have behaved unkindly and inconsiderately. At this point, recall what you learned during the third step and have compassion on yourself, smile wryly at your omission, and resolve to do better tomorrow. When these three actions have become habitual and part of your daily routine, it is time to up your game and try for two acts of kindness every day and to prevent yourself on two occasions from inflicting unnecessary pain. Then go for three—and so on. It will not be easy. The goal is to behave in this way “all day and every day.”

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  There must be a thousand differences between a Vietnamese and an Irish gutter; surely it would have made more sense for Christina to work for homeless children in Ireland; there was no real connection between herself and the Vietnamese girl. But during the previous steps, we have been developing a more empathetic outlook, based on imagination rather than logic. Our work has revealed that we are not alone in our suffering but that everybody is in pain. Instead of retreating into the Buddha’s pleasure park, we have allowed our own unhappiness and the sorrow of other people to invade our consciousness. We have learned that we cannot put ourselves in a special, separate category. Instead we have tried to cultivate the considerate attitude of shu (“likening to oneself”), reflexively relating our own pain to the distress of others. As a result, we are beginning to acquire what Tibetan Buddhists call “the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow,” so that we feel it almost as intensely as we feel our own. We are probably deluged with more images of pain than any previous generation; they are beamed into our homes nightly on the evening news. It is easy to get compassion fatigue and tempting to dismiss these spectacles from our minds, telling ourselves that there is nothing we personally can do and that this misery has nothing to do with us. Christina had probably seen and subliminally remembered the famous television footage of the little Vietnamese girl running in terror from a napalm bombing; it was an image that probably did more than any political speech to turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War. She could easily have thrust it from her mind, telling herself that she had, after all, suffered enough. But she had unconsciously made the connection between herself and the Vietnamese child. She did not allow herself to forget her dream—as if she knew at some subconscious level that it was the clue that would one day bring her out of her own labyrinth. Her story suggests how we too can achieve a similar moment of recognition. Instead of steeling ourselves against the intrusion of other people’s pain, we should regard our exposure to global suffering as a spiritual opportunity. Make a conscious effort to allow these television images to enter your consciousness and take up residence there. Extend your hospitality to them, and “make place for the other” in your life. It is a powerful way of developing “concern for everybody.” If a particular image speaks to you strongly, focus on it as Christina did. As in her case, there may be a special reason for this.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  What particularly attracted me to Turner’s watercolor, said Austerlitz, was not merely the similarity of the scene in Lausanne to the funeral at Cutiau, but the memory it prompted in me of my last walk with Gerald in the early summer of 1966, through the vineyards above Morges on the banks of Lake Geneva. During my subsequent studies of Turner’s life and his sketchbooks I discovered the fact, entirely insignificant in itself but nonetheless one I found curiously moving, that in 1798 he, Turner, had himself visited the estuary of the Mawddach on a journey through Wales, and that at the time he was exactly the same age as I was at the funeral in Cutiau. As I speak of it now, said Austerlitz, it is as if I had been sitting in the south-facing drawing room of Andromeda Lodge among the mourners only yesterday, as if I could still hear their quiet murmuring, and Adela saying she didn’t know what she would do with herself now, all alone in that big house. Gerald, who was then in his last year of school and had come over from Oswestry especially for the funeral, told me about the lack of any improvement in conditions at Stower Grange, which he described as a horrible inkblot disfiguring the souls of its pupils for ever. He was kept from going mad, said Gerald, only by the fact that since joining the Air Cadet Corps he had been able to fly over the whole wretched place in a Chipmunk and get right away from it once a week. The further you can rise above the earth the better, he said, and for that same reason he had decided to study astronomy. About four o’clock I went down to Barmouth station with Gerald. When I returned—dusk was already falling, said Austerlitz, and fine rain hung suspended in the air, apparently without sinking to the ground—Adela came to meet me from the misty depths of the garden, muffled up in greenish-brown tweed with millions of tiny drops of water clinging to the fine fuzz of its outline and forming a kind of

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  So during this step, we should take ourselves mentally to the summit of a high mountain, where can stand back and see things from a different perspective. As you undertake this exercise, it might be helpful to think in terms of the Confucian concentric circles of compassion, starting with your family, moving out to your friends and community, and finally to the country in which you live. Many of the things we have long taken for granted—our financial institutions and our political policies, both at home and abroad—seem suddenly inadequate. We are unable to deal with the massive problems of hunger and poverty; we know that our environmental policies are unsustainable, and yet we cannot seem to find a viable way of dealing with them. We look around us and realize that something needs to be done, yet find no immediate solutions. But we should not approach our task with the harsh zeal of a reformer; there should be no anger, frustration, or impatience in our survey. We must look at our community with compassion, estimate its strengths as well as its weaknesses, and assess its potential for change. Let us start with the family. It is true, as the old adage says, that charity begins at home. As the Confucians have taught us, the family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. Family life involves self-sacrifice, because daily we have to put ourselves to one side in order to accommodate the needs of other family members; nearly every day there is something to forgive. Instead of seeing this as an irritant, we should see these tensions as opportunities for growth and transformation. Ask yourself what you really feel about your family. What makes you proud and happy about them? Make a list of the ways in which your family nourishes you. Perhaps you could write a letter to them outlining your history as a family, and your hopes and fears for each person in it. Does your family have a black sheep, and how has this situation come about? Can it be rectified? How do you conduct arguments and disagreements? What are your particular strengths in family life? Is there anything more you could do?

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In his yoga sessions, at each stage of his descent into the depths of his mind, he would contemplate what he called the “four immeasurable minds of love,” that “huge, expansive and immeasurable feeling that knows no hatred,” and direct them to the farthest corners of the world, not omitting a single creature from this radius of concern. First, he would evoke maitri (“loving kindness”), inducing in his mind an attitude of friendship for everything and everybody; next he meditated on karuna (“compassion”), desiring that all creatures be free of pain; third, he would bring to his mind mudita , the pure “joy” he had experienced under the rose-apple tree and that he now desired for all creatures; and finally he would try to free himself of personal attachment and partiality by loving all sentient beings with the “even-mindedness” of upeksha . Over time, by dint of disciplined practice, Gotama found that his mind broke free of the prism of selfishness and felt “expansive, without limits, enhanced, without hatred or petty malevolence.” 21 He had understood that while spite, hatred, envy, and ingratitude shrink our horizons and limit our creativity, gratitude, compassion, and altruism broaden our perspective and break down the barricades we erect between ourselves and others in order to protect the frightened, greedy, insecure ego. 22 The Buddha’s crucial insight was that to live morally was to live for others. It was not enough simply to enjoy a religious experience. After enlightenment, he said, a person must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion to all, doing anything he or she could to alleviate the misery of other people. After achieving Nirvana, he had been tempted to luxuriate in the transcendent peace he had found, but instead he spent the remaining forty years of his life on the road teaching his method to others. In Mahayana Buddhism, the hero is the bodhisattva, who is on the brink of enlightenment but instead of disappearing into the bliss of Nirvana, decides to return to the suffering world: “We will become a shelter for the world, the world’s place of rest, the final relief of the world, islands of the world, lights of the world, and the guides of the world’s salvation” 23 The Chinese sages focused less on the psychology of compassion and more on its potential social and political implications. In the West, Confucius is often seen as a petty-minded ritualist, obsessed with the minutiae of stultifying rules governing family life. He did indeed revive these ancient rites but saw them as a means of controlling egotism and cultivating compassion. These rituals ( li ) had been deliberately developed in the Yellow River basin during the eighth century BCE to moderate the extravagant behavior of the nobility.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The rabbis had seen too much of the horror of warfare to condone the old chauvinisms. Not only had they witnessed the destruction of their holy city in 70, but the Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman occupation in 132–35 CE had resulted in catastrophic loss of Jewish life. Judaism, like the other monotheisms, is not a wholly pacifist religion; warfare is permitted, but only in self-defense.53 Yet for the rabbis, peace (shalom) is one of the highest values of all: shalom was more than a mere absence of conflict; it can also be translated as “wholeness, completion.” Shalom was to be pursued as a positive harmonious principle in which opposites could be reconciled.54 The rabbis cited the Jewish command “You shall not hate your brother in your heart,” pointing out that it was not sufficient to refrain from cursing or slapping your neighbor, but that enmity had to be extirpated from the deepest reaches of the mind55 and that hatred of one’s fellow creatures put a man beyond the pale.56 True power lay not in martial strength but in compassion and reconciliation. “Who is mighty?” the rabbis asked. “He who turns an enemy into a friend.”57 In their interpretation of the biblical doctrine of creation, the rabbis focused on the fact that all human beings were made in God’s image. To show disrespect to anyone was therefore regarded as a denial of God himself and tantamount to atheism, and murder was not simply a crime against humanity but a sacrilege.58 God had created only one man at the beginning of time to teach us that destroying a single life was equivalent to annihilating the world, while to save a life redeemed the entire human race.59 To humiliate anybody—even a slave or a non-Jew—was, like murder, a sacrilegious desecration of God’s image, and to spread a libelous story about anybody at all was to deny God’s existence.60 Charity was the ultimate test of faith. You could not worship God unless you honored your fellow humans, whoever they might be.