Ringing Compassion

I have been thinking about compassion a lot. It started a few weeks ago when I was at a flea market, and noticed many sizes of Tibetan singing bowls in one booth. One large bowl, nine inches in diameter and four inches deep, had a deep pure tone when I rang it with the mallet. The vendor showed me how to hold the bowl in the palm of my hand and rub the edge of the bowl with a suede covered mallet. Soon, soft vibrations began, growing louder as it responded to the friction of the leather.

Around the outside in a strange script is some writing which the man told me is “Om Mane Padme Hum,” a repeated prayer for compassion. That convinced me to buy it. Every few days since then I have rubbed the edge of the bowl so it would ring out a prayer for compassion in its full voice.

I need to hear that prayer for my daily life as well as during my time providing spiritual direction. It is hard to be able to be compassionate and stay present to the pain in others. I am not alone in readily hiding behind a wall by offering advice or by judging and rejecting the person in pain or by being unwilling to listen. It is hard for all of us to lower the protective wall. Being fully present with someone in pain strikes the memory of our own pain like the hard mallet strikes the singing bowl.

Compassion is grounded in being able to listen, completely and lovingly, even when my own pain, whether in the past or the present, claims my attention. My ability to listen is shaped by how I have claimed, respected and healed from my own times of suffering. The more I have been able to accept and remember my struggles, the more likely I am able to decide to let down the wall and really be available to another.

As a man, I am trained by my culture to be invulnerable, to stay in control of the situation, to keep up the wall. So the decision to let myself be affected by other’s wounding, to be vulnerable with any other person is counter-cultural. It challenges my internal habits and others’ expectations.

The model for being counter-cultural became more clear this year as I moved through Holy Week. Throughout the events of the Last Supper, betrayal, sham courts, beatings, and crucifixion, Jesus chose to be vulnerable. He chose to give up control, and to endure the worst that humans can do to each other. God in Christ experienced the full range of the emotional and physical pain.

What the social culture did not understand then and still does not understand is that Jesus’ choice to be vulnerable also opened him to the power God’s healing. So too, when I am able to be vulnerable, I am opened to the power of God’s healing.

Compassion is not ethereal or abstract, but is experienced in our presence with and for each other, just as God became flesh and was available for us. In offering compassion to another person, and in my awareness of God’s continual healing and forgiving compassion for me, I may make manifest God’s presence and compassion to others.

When I hold the singing bowl to strike it, its vibrations touch not only my ears, but all of me. So it is with God’s compassion. We can experience the ringing pure tone that touches body, mind, heart and soul, God with us.