From Where I Sit                                  Judith Lynch (writing from Melbourne)                                    Judith's website

February 11, 2012                               "Of course I will"                          Judith's previous articles
 

The little girl hovered around the teacher on yard duty. Boys hurtled by chasing a football, girls sat in clumps or played complicated chasing games.  “I’ve got no-one to play with”, a little voice said.  She was about six, wearing a uniform that was too big for her and sneakers that had seen better days, probably on someone else’s feet. 

We have all been that little girl. Maybe it goes back to childhood, quite possibly a part of those dicey adolescent years,
but could be as recent as last week. It’s not just lepers who feel left out or excluded.

The people we exclude, the things that exclude us are legion - skin colour, religious beliefs, political preferences, body shape, out-of-fashion clothes, physical deformity, homeless or just old. We attach labels to people who challenge our perceptions of how things should be – illegal, gay, dole bludger, queue-jumper, punk. Then there are the racist names which we shall leave nameless.

Occasionally we find ourselves falling into the blame game, the Them and Us trap. But generally speaking countless sermons and homilies, Gospel reflections and the media have done a good job. We are compassionate people and we are compassionate for the right reasons. We give money, time and energy to good causes both in our own country and abroad. Our hearts reach out to families who have seen lifestyles demolished by fire or flood.

Sometimes all this means we suffer from compassion fatigue. I get it sometimes - often- when  I watch the evening news.
So much suffering, so many hungry children, so many lives turned upside down by war and fighting, so many places where power is misused. So much need, so many places where the healing power of God is needed – and it has to come from me?

Whether it’s expressed by spending a year in a transit camp in the Sudan or just chatting with an overseas student at the bus-stop, we need to acknowledge that compassion can be tiring and demanding. Maybe Jesus experienced it too. 
He sometimes ran away from it all, seeking a quiet place, somewhere that gave him space to re-charge his spiritual batteries,
time to touch into God his Father, a breathing space that gave him the energy to continue to heal the sick and the broken,
to be a front man for those who yearned for justice.

There’s not a lot of correlation between formal, institutionalised religion and compassion. I like to think of compassion as religion with skin on. Compassion expands the heart and recognises that we too know loss, loneliness, pain, sorrow. 
It’s not what we do, it’s how we do it and why we do it that makes the difference between compassion and religiosity. 

From where I sit I recognise that my religious beliefs and upbringing have impressed on me that it doesn’t matter how much I do, I have never done enough. I acknowledge that. I haven’t, and I never will. If we take the Gospel message seriously then we need to be compassionate to themselves as well as others. to recognise our helplessness, our poverty. 
Like Jesus, we take it to prayer and know that the next time someone asks something of us we too can say,
 “Of course I will”.