“What I do I would not. What I would I do not.”[1] Why is it that so often we human beings fail to act out of our own centre? Rather, we react to what is before us out of previous experiences, forgotten struggles or idealized hopes and dreams. What is uppermost in our mind or heart frames and colours how we see what is coming to greet us. Our mind has prepared the ground for what we assume is before us and our passions, our suffering, shape how we react. We fail to be present to what is. Old patterns are called forth, fill the space and bracket new possibilities, spontaneity, actual engagement. Of all the creatures in the world, at least as far as we know, we human beings are the only ones who have the capacity to not live our own life. We live the moment based on the landscape of yesterday or our dreams of tomorrow. “What I do I would not. What I would I do not.” This diagnosis of our spiritual dis-ease dates from the foundations of the Christian tradition.
The central challenge to the spiritual life of human beings is not acquiring virtue, not even the virtue of compassion. The central challenge is our passions[2], our suffering, our illusions, our stepping out of life, our “missing of the mark”[3]. So, it is not surprising that we have a story called, “The Passion”[4] at the centre of the Gospel. Odd, how such an awful story of the killing of the best of human beings, an innocent man, comes to be seen as a divine revelation, indeed, the “good news” at the very heart of human nature and what holds the world together. The passion story of Jesus Christ anchors all Orthodox spiritual discipline. It is a haunting, tragic, and liberating narrative. It is a narrative of him who we see as the fullest expression of the human nature and all we really know of God. His life, acts, and teachings reveal to us the “Word of life”, unveiling for us our deepest nature. It invites us to the recovery of our nature through emptying ourselves of our passions so we may be present to what is given in each encounter in the life of the world. It is the disciplines of self-emptying[5] that opens, nurtures, and enlarge our capacity to be present without desire or fear. In that presence our heart and mind are attentive to the passions of others, to their suffering. Co-suffering love, compassion, bubbles up when our own struggles, our passions, are no longer front and centre.
Click here to download the Full article: Passion and Compassion
[1] These are the words of a great struggler, a Jew with a good Greek education, in the first century of the common ere. The Apostle Paul knew this condition in the marrow of his being. In many of his letters he discusses one or another aspect of this disease. Romans 7:15-20.
[2] “Passion” means “suffering” in the Orthodox literature on the spiritual life. In the Orthodox understanding of the human nature human desires are not disordered. The narrative of the Fall in Genesis 3 did not lead to a change in the being of creation as Western theology teaches in its doctrine of Original Sin. Rather, the Fall narrative is a revelation of self-forgetfulness. In Orthodox spiritual theology healing and restoration is the point.
[3] “Missing the mark” connotes an archery term, to miss the target. For Jews, the goal or target of life is life itself, being present to the existence given when we are born into the world.
[4] The “passion narratives” take up a substantial part of the four Gospels, Matthew 26:30-27:66; Mark 14:26-15:47; Luke 22:39-23:56; and, John 18:1-19:42. These texts are at play in every Orthodox Liturgy and form the bulk of the liturgies shaping Holy Week leading up to and including Pascha, the Feast of Resurrection.
[5] “Self-emptying” is at the centre of the apophatic theology of the Christian East. See, “The Spiritual Way”, John Chryssavgis in The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology, edited by Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokritoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008):150-163
Comments