COMPASSION:

THE MARROW OF CIVILIZATION

By Moin Qazi

An award winning poet, Moin Qazi holds a doctorate and is an independent researcher and
consultant who has spent three decades in microfinance with State Bank of India, India’s
largest bank, where he was involved in microfinance as a grassroots manager and as head of
its microfinance operations in Maharashtra. He belongs to the first batch of managers of
commercial banks who were associated with the launch of India’s microfinance programme.
He writes regularly on development finance and environmental issues. He was a Visiting
Fellow at the University of Manchester specializing in microfinance.
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“Only a moral, spiritual revolution in the name of human dignity can place
man above the idols of economic production, technological organisation,
racial discrimination and national egotism”, said Pope John Paul II. The
Pope’s message to the world resonates with the spirit of brotherhood:
We must meet as pilgrims who set out to find God in human
hearts. Person must meet person, nation must meet nation, as
brothers and sisters, as children of God. In this mutual
understanding and friendship, in this sacred communion, we must
also begin to work together to build the common future of the
human race. It must be built on a common love that embraces all
and has its roots in God who is love.
Mother Teresa felt that the hunger for love is much more difficult to
remove than the hunger for bread. The material is not the only thing that
gives joy. Something greater than that is the deep sense of peace in the
heart. When the people die in peace, in the love of God it is a wonderful
thing.
Speaking of herself she said, “It is His work. I don’t claim anything of the
work; I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking.
He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it. The pencil has
only to be allowed to be used.”
John Ruskin also echoes the same tone: “It is not written, blessed is he
that feedeth the poor, but he that considereth the poor. A little thought
and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.”
When Rabindranath Tagore started his own school in 1901 to enable
students to imbibe spiritual, artistic and practical elements, apart from the
theoretical knowledge, he wrote:
We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We
may become powerful by knowledge, but we attain fullness by
sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely
give us information, but makes our life grow, in harmony with all
existence.
 Tagore found man’s heart, “anguished with the fever of unrest, with the
poison of self-seeking, with a thirst that knows no end.” He found
countries far and wide flaunt the blood-red mark of hatred. He wanted to
bring harmony into their life. That is possible only through love. “Trust
love,” he said, “even if it brings sorrow, do not close up your heart.”
He lamented that mighty powers deeply drenched up in ego and
arrogance cannot bring peace. Harmony, understanding and tolerance
alone can bring it. “We come nearest to the great when we are great in
humility.” He says again: “Men are cruel, but man is kind. The false can
never grow into truth by growing in power.”
The British thinker Joad feels that the satanic instinct in man has
overtaken his sanity. He feels, “Man’s true enemy is within himself, it has
its strength in his own uncontrolled passion and appetites — new won
power over nature has not tamed these; on the contrary, it has rendered
them more violent because it has given them greater opportunity for
gratification.”
John Donne echoed the same message:” Because Angels could not
propagate, nor make more Angels, God enlarges his love in making man,
that so he might enjoy all natures at once, and have the nature of Angels,
and the nature of earthly creatures in one person.”
According to John Ronner, some researchers into the brain think that
empathy — a compassionate feeling for other creatures and their situation
— is the main job of the so-called prefrontal cortex, the brain’s most
recently evolved section. One of the world’s greatest mystics, genius
scientist of the 1700’s Emmanuel Swedenbarg said flatly: “Angels are
human forms, are men, for I have conversed with them as man to man.
The positive thinker attracts fortune and repels harm.”
Tagore too agreed with the ‘vital savage’ in us, but he wanted it to be
tamed In fact, he believed in the sublimation of these emotions. “We
should not thwart our fundamental urges but must train them into useful
fields. We should never choke our emotions but channelise them into
correct modes of life,” he felt.
Our faith in God and human beings too is shown precisely in the small
acts of kindness, brotherhood or sisterhood and familiarity in our day-to-
day lives. Faith in God and human beings does not require us to display
heroic acts of courage and fidelity. On the contrary, it is the day-to-day
commitments to our near and dear that make up the fabric of our lives.
But, if we had not learned simple acts of faith at our mother’s knees we
would be taken by storm and would be totally unprepared to meet the
eventualities of life when faced with a crisis. Faith is in fact a day-to-day
response to the ordinary as well as the extraordinary. Our attitudes to the
ordinary prepare us to meet extraordinary situations with equanimity.
Lloyd Sheares advises us: “Resolve to be tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant
of the weak and the wrong. Because some time or in our lives we would
have been all these ourselves.”
 A great many saints and sears have continuously exhorted man to get
over the satanic instincts and give the angelic trait an environment for
growth. But their words have not been able to penetrate the new shroud
in which the human mind has become enwrapped. The sensitivity of the
heart is the crucial factor in this process. There are too many holes in our
society, too many happenings. They arouse sympathy in some; most
remain untouched by them. The message has been ringing loud and clear,
it is only our hearts which are growing benumbed to the sweet cadence of
its notes. Some are born with a chord that is perpetually tied to the
musical notes of this song; there are others who at some time in their life
feel the music slowly striking the chocked chords and moving them into
rhythms. But the vast majorities are those chords have stopped
functioning. Masses of mankind have continually broken from the stream
of humanity, have listened to the prompting of their own desires and have
given way to the cravings of their own heart. It was man’s weak heart,
which had made George Washington “labour to keep alive in his breast
that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.”
Apart from the message, the preacher should himself have such an
exalted character that his preaching has moral strength. The Sufi saint
Bayazid says this about himself: “I was all revolutionary when I was young
and all my prayer to God was ‘Lord, give me the energy to change the
world’, As I approached middle age and realised that half of my life was
gone without my changing a single soul, I changed my prayer to: ‘Lord,
give me the grace to change all those who come in contact with me, just
my family and friends and I shall be content.’ Now, that I am an old man
and my days are numbered, my one prayer is, ‘Lord, give me the grace to
change myself.’ If I had prayed for this right from the start I should not
have wasted my life.”
Tolstoy exclaims vehemently: “Everybody thinks of changing humanity
and nobody thinks of changing himself.”
Compassion without kindness is only half a loaf. Make it your task to
perform one act of kindness per day, no matter how small. It can be as
simple as picking up a scrap of paper in your neighbour’s yard, yielding to
a car in traffic, or as complex as making a lonely person feel loved. The
important thing is to make kindness a part of your daily life, so it becomes
a normal response and you don’t have to strain to summon it forth from
the dregs of your soul.
Inevitably, people do things to hurt us. Inevitably, we do things that hurt
others. This is part of what it means to be human, to have feelings, to be
imperfect, to be vulnerable. Compassion moves us beyond our own
wounds and back into human community. It asks the question: What sorts
of people do bad things? The answer: lonely, scared, ignorant, confused,
sick, misguided, angry, fallible, human sort of people — in other words, all
of us
But in our materialistic and ego-centred cultures, compassion is a dying
gift. When best selling books and movies all seem to focus on self
indulgence, and encourage whining over the personal and small problems
of life, how can we grow into compassionate, unselfish beings? How can
those who are truly compassionate avoid being hurt, used and abused by
those who only take and never give in return?
The answer has as many petals as an unfolding lotus flower, and within
each petal is a simple truth. But finding and living that truth is difficult and
nearly impossible for some.
Ingersoll put it in more felicitous language: “Happiness is the only good;
the place to be happy is here; the place to be happy is now; the way to be
happy is to help others.” Ela Wheeler Wilcox put the same in plainer
words: “So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and
wind, when just the art of being kind, is all that the world needs.”