Each week in worship I pray for both the renewal of the church and the renewal of all faith communities. I pray that we will return to our roots and drink deeply from a common well of compassion.
Religion is rooted in the experience of awe, an experience of benevolence and well-being that comes to one as a gift. Religious experience is the feeling and knowledge that all is one.
Doctrine, at its best, tries to put this experience into words, but quite often people learn the words but forget the experience. Folks try to recapture the experience through ritual, but rituals cannot create the experience of gift and grace. All ritual can do is remember; it can only point away from itself toward something greater. When religious folk forget that experience trumps doctrine, one inevitably gets violence as the result.
When what we believe trumps how we actually act, the result is always separation into clean versus unclean, good versus evil, the in-group versus the out-group. Over time such divisions create the conditions that exterminate the other so that the righteous may rule.
Economic and military elites know all about these human dynamics. They use these dynamics as weapons in their wars of segregation and conquest. Religion is infiltrated, used and abused to amass power for the few over the many. Every religious reformer fought against, and often died, as a protest in resistance to such folly.
It is no different today. This autumn’s election will not be about policy. After all, both political parties are committed to funding war, reducing civil liberties, plundering the commonwealth and increasing the penalty for those who dare to dissent. Policy is not on the agenda of politicians because our system is corrupted beyond repair. We are already heading into a full-spectrum dictatorship of militarized money. The only mystery remaining is how to frame it so that people meekly accept such tyranny.
In a political context in which the people no longer have power or capacity to influence those with power, what, specifically, can we do? I want to submit that the only resistance possible is to cultivate a lifestyle of compassion. The word compassion means to “suffer with” the other. It is to put yourself inside the shoes of the other, experiencing life from the perspective of the other. Our only hope to change the system is to change the mythology and worldview that guides it. We must change our desires, and move away from love of money, status and possessions into a greater love for the other. We must relearn how to prioritize the care of human beings and the earth over that of wealth and military conquest.
Compassion might well be our last remaining freedom. Building moral communities that teach and embody the skills of compassion might well be the only way left to transform the ruins into renewal.