Compassion and Migrants

Compassion - and healing - that's what we need in bucket-loads in this damaged, wounded and suffering world.

There was a very good article in last Saturday's Times newspaper entitled "Think Carefully before joining the back lash on migrants."
Written by the Right Reverend Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, and addressing the fears of many of us about being "overrun" by migrants from different cultures, it persuasively argues the point that
"the basis of a cohesive society is neither ethnic uniformity nor ethnic diversity for its own sake." Rather, society is held together by compassion for our fellow beings, regardless of their backgrounds. There is a great deal of very real suffering out there which should appall us and it calls for a great deal of compassion. Our fears must not override that compassion, he argues, and that compassion, when shown to the defenceless is a "barometer of the moral health of a society."
Hear hear. This is why I wrote Healing This Wounded Earth: with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope, arguing for and showing the means of achieving such change in our society in all walks of life, Never has the message been more relevant than now.
It's really worth reading what Graham Tomlin has to say if you have access to the full article.
And of course it's worth reading my own book!

Time for a new era of responsibility?

In his Nobel Lecture, on December 11^th 1964, Peace Prize Laureate Martin Luther King reminded us:

 “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’ Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority...

In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. 

The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers’ keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality”.

                                    --------------------------------------

Three centuries earlier the Renaissance author and Anglican priest John Donne famously wrote in 1624:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. 

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. (1) 

                                         ----------------------------------------

The Apostle Paul, writing in his first epistle to the Corinthians, on human worth, likened the worldwide body of Christians with the human body. All parts of the body are essential for the complete welfare of the whole. In the same way we all need each other and the loss of any part weakens us all: there should be no discord between us. He taught his followers that the members of the church should ‘have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.’ (2) The ‘body’ in this biblical context is translated from the Greek Soma, related to Sozo meaning ‘to heal, preserve, be made whole.’ We are not whole: we are wounded or spiritually impoverished if we are not a part of the greater body of faith in our community. 

We all need to feel that connectedness, that relationship. We need to find unity within the wide diversity of all our individual gifts. We all need each other and we all are special in the eyes of God.

Followers of the Baha’i faith see Earth as one country of which we are all citizens. (3) One of their guiding principles is that ‘the oneness of humanity is the fundamental spiritual and social truth shaping our age.’

Whatever our faith, or none, we can all be guided by these truths.  

In this fraught age, isn’t this our personal responsibility? 

Adapted from "Healing This Wounded Earth: with Compassion.Spirit and the Power of Hope".

References:

1. John Donne seventeenth century English poet died 1631. Famous words of prose taken from the final lines of his 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.

2. Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1 Corinthians 12. 25, 26.

3. From Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, as he enjoins his followers to develop a sense of world citizenship and a commitment to stewardship of the earth. From Palmer, Martin with Victoria Finlay, Faith in Conservation: New Approaches to Religions and the Environment, The World Bank Washington DC 2003 p. 72.

It seems the World is short of compassion...

Imagine travelling in a vehicle crammed so full with other passengers that you have no space to sit down – OK, underground transit systems in rush hour tick that box. 

But then imagine that the journey is 18 hours long, over hundreds of miles, perhaps involving a sea crossing which could be bumpy and uncomfortable. It is stifling hot outside and within the vehicle and you are given no comfort stops, for loos and refreshments.

Then imagine that we are talking about sheep, or cattle. The stench within the soiled truck can be overwhelming, the pitiful bleating heartrending. By the end of the journey there are up to a hundred or more sickly, exhausted, and stressed animals, that may even on arrival at their destination be unloaded into overcrowded “fattening barns”, devoid of sunlight and green pastures, perhaps for up to a month or so before being taken for slaughter.

What a fate. No animal should be allowed to suffer like this.

Farm animals can experience pain and distress just like us, and they can also know contentment and well-being.

According to the website of Compassion in World Farming, over 40 billion animals worldwide are confined in factory farming systems which prevent them from doing what animals do naturally. How cruel is that?

If we insist on eating animals we really do owe it to them that they do not have to suffer so much in their lives. 

But this is what happens all the time when animals are forced to travel may miles before slaughter. In the UK live exports are a particular horror that is currently being addressed by Compassion in World Farming.  

It may seem almost irrelevant to be worried about animal suffering when we cannot even deal adequately with the immense suffering of fellow human beings, innocent children in Syria for example.

But both matter. A truly compassionate heart doesn’t differentiate – a compassionate heart must hold a deep concern for all sentient beings, human or otherwise.

It seems we are very short of compassion in our world.

For more information you can go to the websites of Compassion in World Farming and The Humane Society of the United States.

Please care about our animals. Please consider supporting organic farming if you must eat meat. Please consider eating less meat, even going vegetarian. Please find compassion in your heart for these creatures that do not have a voice, other than a pitiful bleat or bellow when life is not treating them well.

A world in urgent need of more compassion...

In a week when the crisis in Syria escalates, and when retiring Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is quoted as saying that mankind has "lost the plot", it is sobering to reflect on the fact that man’s place in nature is unique. He is not only conscious of his own evolution, but he can shape his evolutionary future by how he behaves. And we surely behave badly!

Sure, we commit acts of violence against each other and against ourselves, of a physical and brutal nature, that is widely seen across our media. But this violence can be more subtle, such as verbal abuse and childhood bullying. There is aggression and violence in our homes, on our streets, and between communities as well as between nations.

And that is not all. We also commit acts of violence against the environment, manifested in pollution, soil erosion, species extinctions and perhaps in some of the effects of climate change we are now experiencing. We are all guilty of thoughtless and selfish patterns of behavior that can so often directly or indirectly contribute to the suffering of others.

The real problem is that on its own no amount of any rule and regulation, law or leadership, will change the way we behave. Rather than having regulation thrust upon us, we need to understand why we behave as we do and really commit our hearts and our minds to the need for change. Perhaps that means tracing our behavior back to the healing needs of our own wounds. This does not mean our physical wounds, but the wounds we have inherited and those from our own suffering, from the way we react to personal experiences that life has thrown at us: our insecurities and fears, our feelings of hopelessness and despair, that can be reflected in greed and envy, in over-consumption, violence and addictions to work or harmful substances.

Our unhealed wounds are potentially dangerous not only for our own personal well being but for the future of the world. We are in grave danger of being driven by our present behavior to spiritual bankruptcy and physical destruction. Action is urgent.

To find healing and wholeness we need to reconnect with our roots, with our souls, rediscovering our spirituality and our faith, and healing those wounds. And once we have found healing for our wounds, we may even discover that we are uniquely equipped to understand the wounds of others, to walk alongside them and assist them in their own healing process. We will feel a profound and healing compassion towards all sentient beings. This is what it means to be a Wounded Healer.  And this is surely our future. Is it too much to hope for?

Compassion and Empathy part 2

I wrote recently of the need to infuse our lives with compassion and empathy, for a better world. But compassion must not stop with humans. Don't forget the animals!

I am reminded forcefully of this from seeing the latest horrors from Compassion in World Farming  who have a dreadful report on the cruelty pigs are subjected to in Italy  -  don't look if you will be upset by images of pigs that are left in appalling conditions waiting to die, maybe many days or weeks later.

1 in every 30 Americans, that is 10 million people, back the Humane Society of the United States,  an organization that seeks a humane and sustainable world for all animals and is America’s ‘mainstream force against cruelty, exploitation and neglect.’ This means that 29 out of every 30 or 290 million Americans may not care very much about animal cruelty. That is a huge number of people. Many farm animals are subjected to the most appallingly cruel conditions in factory farms. Would those who love their own family pets be happy for them to be treated to the same kind of cruelty? 

By our inactions we appear to condone miserable birthing cages or farrowing crates for female pigs, where they are held for months and can hardly move let alone turn around or socialize with other pigs; we eat and apparently enjoy the French delicacy pate de foie gras which requires that ducks and geese are force-fed unnaturally large quantities of food through a metal tube that is shoved down their throats and into their stomachs two or three times each day. This barbaric treatment produces a liver that is fatty, diseased and ten times the normal size. It sounds disgusting and it is; goodness knows how those birds must suffer. We prefer not to know about the calves separated from their mothers within the first few days of birth and crammed into individual crates or stalls, tethered by their necks, so they can hardly move, for the duration of their dreadful short lives; and we ignore the plight of the 280 million laying hens in the United States which spend their lives cooped up in tiny cages with no more than the space of an A4 piece of paper that they can (hardly) call their own. 

I'm sorry if you find this shocking. If you don't find it shocking then I am sorry for you - and for the fate of animals that touch your lives in any way.

Let's all make a difference. Let's all help to put an end to suffering - of humans and animals - let's cultivate empathy and compassion in all that we do!!

Compassion and Empathy

It was Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his essay A Defence of Poetry, who wrote that empathy is different from and goes way beyond sympathy or pity, and requires well-developed imagination, “the great instrument of moral good.”

There is an emerging science of empathy that is demonstrating that we are actually wired for empathy and compassion, that empathy exists at a neurophysiological level and that we are not just the outcome of a selfish gene. We all have the natural potential for showing empathy or concern to others, and this can be nurtured or crushed by the circumstances of our upbringing. But we need that affection from birth. The development of our mind depends on interactions face to face. Neuroscience tells us that specific brain areas respond to kindness and compassion and there is a correlation between the size of a child’s brain and the attention or neglect he experiences. Children who have not received sufficient care and compassion can feel unlovable, and can be high in self-criticism. In other words our social and developmental psychology is affected by the way we are brought up. This of course gives us a totally different understanding of human nature and has enormous significance for our societies. While our religion might teach us to be compassionate and loving, our upbringing might very well take us away from the possibility of such behavior coming naturally to us. It then needs to be re-learned, nurtured and encouraged. And it should be the religions that are there to bring us back on track.

“Empathy and compassion

To the shame of all the established religions, it has taken a secular initiative to kick-start what the world desperately needs and what the world’s religions pretty much all teach through the Golden Rule; that we should all be loving our neighbors as ourselves, showing compassion for all.

The religions’ historian Karen Armstrong was frustrated that not enough was seemingly being done by the world’s religions to promote their own moral codes of love and compassion. Perhaps this was a fair indictment. Compassion manifests itself in the world, she says, not by thinking but by doing and she wanted to bring compassion back to the very heart of moral and spiritual life. So with the support of the Fetzer Institute and a multi-faith, multi-national council of thinkers and leaders who helped with the drafting, the Charter for Compassion was launched globally in 2009. It is an idea whose time had definitely come.

Compassion literally means ‘to suffer with or alongside’ someone. We identify with you in your suffering; we can show mercy or sorrow with you in your pain. Empathy goes a little further and is the capacity to experience what it is like to be someone else. We can bare our own souls and walk in your shoes to share your suffering. That is true empathy, although the two words are often used interchangeably. Scientifically empathy should not be possible, but it is!"

The Charter for Compassion recently launched an International Compassionate Cities campaign, endorsed by a US Conference of Mayors including Mayor Greg Fischer of Louisville, KY, and the mayors of Columbia, SC; Des Moines, IA; Nashville, TN; Frankfort, KY; Raleigh, NC; and Westland, MI. This initiative, says the Charter, “has the potential to inspire a fundamental shift in our ability to thrive as human beings.” 

Let's go for it. We live in such a beautiful world. Let's all help  infuse it with compassion and empathy in everything that we do. That cannot be bad!

Compassionate Healthcare - An NHS in need of healing

My friends and followers will notice that I have been quiet for an unacceptably long period of time. The truth is I have been hiding away to complete a book on depression - hopefully to be out later this year.

But I have to put my head above the parapet to comment on the dreadful events at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. Yes it's in the UK but my comments and thoughts apply equally to the American healthcare systems.
Following the Francis Report on the enquiry into this fiasco, our Prime Minister has called for more compassion in the health system. Whilst it has to be said many health care workers are doing an excellent job, it seems that some nurses and doctors have forgotten how to care for their patients.

It is often said that the physician used to be able to cure rarely but care always. Now it seems that the reverse is the case: he can cure very often but somehow it seems that there is often little room for the caring and the healing…

Michael Mayne, busy parish priest who subsequently became Dean of Westminster Abbey within the Anglican Communion, was well qualified to write about the patient’s perception of healthcare. In his book A Year Lost and Found he describes his experiences and struggle with a debilitating episode of ME, or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, the post-viral fatigue syndrome. Of all the various treatments and advice he received for a condition that is still very little understood, he significantly gives special credit to a certain Dr D, whose particular efficacy in helping him cope with his condition is attributed to his grasp of the inter-relatedness of body and spirit…Mayne wrote:

"he talked and he tested or massaged parts of my body. Sometimes he just talked. He had the great gift of encouragement. He understood that the question ‘How are you?’ is at root a metaphysical question, which is not sufficiently answered with clinical lists and data …but goes to the deepest part of ourselves as the complex and uniquely precious beings we are." 

Mayne tragically died from cancer in 2006, but not before heroically putting the finishing touches to his final book The Enduring Melody. This started as a meditation of his life, but when the cancer struck it became his daily meditations interwoven into an autobiography of his final year. The book is a brave and very thoughtful journal through those last ten months. It culminates in a reflective essay on illness and healing, and the need for a holistic approach.

‘To treat a disease,’ he said: “is to inhibit it and hopefully help the body to destroy it or control it: to treat a patient is to observe, foster, nurture and listen to a life...
In an ideal [health service] it would be good if every doctor and nurse in training would reflect on the mystery of the human being with both the learning of the scientist and the observation and sympathy of the novelist or the poet.” 


This is an adapted extract from my first book Healing This Wounded Earth, where in two prescient chapters I write how the health services lost sight of what I call Soul Medicine, in the rush for latest high tech cures, and how we need to return to this more compassionate health care - for the sake of ourselves and our world ; a world in desperate need of healing.  

Trial by Trolls - is there hope for our world?

Isn't it time that each and every one of us started bearing our own share of responsibility in the shaping of our world?

I know that it's 23 years since His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989, but what he said has as much relevance today as then. He emphasized that responsibility doesn't only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. The next day in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture he elaborated on the theme:

"The realisation that we are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering, is very helpful in developing a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood;
a warm feeling of love and compassion for others.
This, in turn, is essential if we are to survive in this ever shrinking world we live in. For if we each selfishly pursue only what we believe to be in our own interest, without caring about the needs of others, we not only may end up harming others but also ourselves. This fact has become very clear during the course of this century. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that by polluting the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some short-term benefit, we are destroying the very basis for our survival. As interdependents, therefore, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility."

Where are we 23 years later? Not in a very good place from where I'm sitting.

I read a piece in yesterday's Sunday Times about "The Torment of Trial by Trolls." For the uninitiated a "troll" is technically someone who deliberately disrupts online commentary with assaults on other contributors or by repeatedly taking threads away from the topic. But as the article points out it has become shorthand for all kinds of internet abuse. First we had road rage. Now it seems that many people are prepared to be abusive, obscene, insulting, mocking, bullying, and so on towards other people when they can hide behind the anonymity and distance of Twitter and Facebook and other social media. What is going on here? Why do we abuse strangers so freely?
Have all these people really nothing better to do with their time than abuse strangers? It seems that some of these trolls are perfectly decent people when met face to face.

Where is that " warm feeling of love and compassion for others" within this kind of beahviour? Is there hope for our world? What about empathy for our fellow beings? And what about the Golden Rule? Treating our neighbors as ourselves?
And not only should we confine the scope of our responsibilities to our own home patch. It is a matter of global justice that we have equal concern for the conditions in which our brothers and sisters live in poor parts of the world.
In December 2001 a Statement was issued by 110 Nobel Laureates on the one-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Nobel Prize. It included a plea for us all to reassess our global obligations to one another. Again it's eleven years ago but it seems we don't learn anything with the passage of time. This is what those Laureates said:
"The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate, and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor."

Eleven years later has much changed? It is a fact that we have the technology and productive resources to eliminate worldwide misery, poverty and injustice. Consider the power of the internet in the Arab Spring, in mobilizing the Occupy Movement.

And it seems that all many of us can do is waste precious moments, hours, days, weeks of our lives in abusive behaviour against our fellow brethren whilst hiding behind the anonymity of that same technology!

Sometimes I feel real despair, ashamed to be a part of the same human race.
Can anyone offer any words of hope?

What would you do?

Imagine the scene. All the family is at home with you for Christmas. You are having a lovely party time – all is merriment and joy. Suddenly your child lunges out at his cousin with the toy sword you gave him from Santa. Blood is drawn and your son shows no sign of stopping. What do you do? You stop him, take away the sword, tend the wounds of the cousin, apologize profusely to the mother and impose punishment or sanctions or both on your son. Of course you do. You do most or all of these things, and peace is restored, a lesson has been learned. You may even think twice about the choice of present another year. You can take some responsibility.You can make a difference.

Now imagine the party scene again, only this time there is a fracas outside your house, in the street. A youth is beating up another and it looks violent. Do you just ignore it? Of course you don’t. If there are enough big strong men in your party they may go out and separate the lads, restore peace: although the police frown upon this vigilante approach, and sadly the good guys may suffer at the hands of the lads. So at the very least you call the police. Don’t you? Of course you do. And if you have any sense of social responsibility at all you would not, should not, resent paying appropriate taxes or rates to fund agents of law and order to keep your home, street, town, county, state or country safe.

Now imagine the party scene one more time – only you have turned on the TV news, just in time to see scenes of appalling rioting, violence and arson on the streets of the town a few miles away.

Or you see scenes of appalling rioting, violence and arson, or murder, or torture, or any dreadful abuse of human rights a little further afield - just across the border, in the next State, County, Country, even in another Continent…global news reaches our front room so quickly and graphically in this digital age.

What do you do?

You may be getting the idea.

Where do we draw the line, the boundaries.

What can we do to relieve suffering elsewhere. Does suffering matter less to us the further away it is, the more remote it is from our own circle of family and friends?

What is our government doing about global suffering? Is it enough? Do we campaign enough? Can we help financially? Can we influence with our vote?

We all tend to live in our own bubble. But not caring about our fellow human beings wherever they live, whoever they are, diminishes us as humans.

Surfing the internet, I came upon the following story told by Amital Etzioni in his blog (July 27, 2007) in connection with his book Spirit of Community.

Five shoppers at a Witchita, Kansas convenience store simply stepped over the body of 27 year-old LaShanda Calloway who lay on the floor bleeding severely. None stopped to ask if she was in need of assistance. None even bothered to call 911. Ms. Calloway died later that day at a Witchita hospital of injuries the result of a stabbing; she had been an innocent bystander, wounded in someone else’s fight.

What can you do to help heal this world?

Let’s bring compassion and empathy back into our lives.

Let’s bring Christ back into Christmas.

I'm taking a few days out from blogging - and I wish all my readers a very happy Christmas. May we all work in 2012 towards a more compassionate World.

Martin Luther King and the Brotherhood of Man

"Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’ Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority...
In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers’ keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality."
(Martin Luther King in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture)

Love and Compassion and Responsibility in a shrinking world

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama emphasized that responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually.
The next day in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture he elaborated on the theme:

“The realisation that we are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering, is very helpful in developing a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood; a warm feeling of love and compassion for others. This, in turn, is essential if we are to survive in this ever shrinking world we live in. For if we each selfishly pursue only what we believe to be in our own interest, without caring about the needs of others, we not only may end up harming others but also ourselves. This fact has become very clear during the course of this century. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that by polluting the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some short-term benefit, we are destroying the very basis for our survival. As interdependents, therefore, we have no other choice than to develop what I call a sense of universal responsibility.”

Most importantly, we cannot confine the scope of our responsibilities to our own country. It is a matter of global justice that we have equal concern for the conditions in which our brothers and sisters live in poor parts of the world. In December 2001 a Statement was issued by 110 Nobel Laureates on the one-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Nobel Prize. It included a plea for us all to reassess our global obligations to one another:

“The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate, and manifestly unjust. It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If, then, we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.”

We may need courage to take a stand, and we have to ensure that we are properly informed before making decisions. But surely it is now time that each and every one of us realized that we must bear our own share of responsibility in the shaping of our world, and then turn that realization into action.
Some debate whether war or climate change poses the greater threat to humanity. As expressed above, the two are in some ways linked. It is an unarguable fact that we have the technology and productive resources to eliminate worldwide misery, poverty and injustice howsoever caused. And we can thus remove some of the threats to peace and stability in many parts of the world.

Religious Pluralism versus Tolerance

Continuing my recent theme of religious tolerance, and why it is not good, and what are the alternatives:

“Eboo Patel is an American Muslim of Indian heritage. Brought up in Chicago, he struggled in his youth with his cultural background and came to understand how different faiths could be the source not only of mutual enrichment but as readily could become mutually exclusive. At school he witnessed religious discrimination at first hand as to his shame he turned away when his Jewish friend was subjected to anti Semitic taunts. Patel was no stranger to bullying himself on account of his faith origins. Most importantly, his own upbringing made him consider the forces that determine whether a youngster follows a route of hatred against the world or takes the alternative and happier route of love and compassion for all. He realized that much depends upon whom you meet when you are at your most impressionable. He saw firsthand that the twenty first century is being dominated not by the color line but by a different line, which he calls the faith line. This, he points out, is no less divisive and no less violent than the color line. The faith line does not divide different faiths, or separate the religious from the secular. This line is divisive between the values of religious totalitarians and the values of the religious pluralists. The former believe that their way is the only way and are prepared to convert, condemn or indeed kill, those who are different, in the name of God. It is this side of the faith line that gives religions a bad press in the eyes of the secular public. The pluralists on the other hand hold that ‘people believing in different creeds and belonging to different communities need to learn to live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.’ Pluralism is the belief, Patel explains, ‘that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make its own unique contribution.’ What Patel soon realized was that the dangerous religious fundamentalism we see around us is nurtured in the young, in the disaffected youth of our day who are taken advantage of and exploited for fundamental political aims. It is those youth of today who fuel the religious conflicts we witness, who martyr themselves while they kill or maim thousands. He also knew that the main faith leaders over the decades who have campaigned for justice and peace, leaders such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela all started young; they became active while still in their youth.
Inspired by this knowledge Patel saw that there could be no better place to make a start in trying to achieve a harmony and a common good among all America’s variants of religion than with this youth of today, those who will shape and see tomorrow’s world. It was against this background that in 2003 he founded the Chicago based Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC).
The idea of the IFYC was simple. Its mission is to build ‘a global movement of interfaith youth cooperation by generating mass public support for interfaith youth work, equipping youth-focused institutions to positively engage their religious diversity, and nurturing the emerging leaders of this movement.’
This has become an extremely successful organization with a multimillion-dollar budget. It actively involves tens of thousands of religiously diverse young people in projects that are taking the message of religious pluralism to millions across six continents.”

References:

Interfaith Youth Core at www.ifyc.org
Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: the Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, Boston: Beacon Press, generally and at p. 61

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011 quoted from Healing this Wounded Earth: with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope, O Books 2011

Worldshift 20 calls for spirit, compassion and personal responsibility

Can we possibly create the world of which (most of us) dream?
Yes but only if we act quickly. It is up to us now, at this most critical of times in the world’s history, to determine whether we grow or die – “whether the 13.8 billion year experiment that resulted in our lives will end within the next century or two.”

This is the message from the newly created Worldshift 20 Council, composed of “twenty prominent global citizens from diverse cultures and religions worldwide.” They include for example Paul Ray (best known for his research and book on the “Cultural Creatives”, and who incidentally endorsed my own book), Deepak Chopra, Ervin Laszlo, Hazel Henderson, Marylyn Schlitz, etc., and all well known for their work and concern for the sustainability of our present life on earth.

They urgently call for a new philosophy, a new Consciousness and the leadership to go with it, reminding us of Einstein’s perceptive observation all that time ago that the same consciousness that produced the problem cannot get us out of it. The call is for a re-orientation within the public sector, replacing obsolete notions of governance that clearly have not worked (witness the G20 debacle in Copenhagan). They want to foster an understanding that our present crisis is a “whole-system crisis of the human spirit” and that leaders must embrace this notion, alongside the development of overriding compassion for all other beings.

But the leaders of the G20, the Worldshift Declaration points out, did not create the world’s problems – they perpetuate them:

“A lack of gratitude toward the environment, exploitive treatment of animal life, plant life and the world of nature, discrimination against people, cultures, and nations – these kinds of destructive behaviors do not originate solely from the minds of a small group of leaders. They also arise from the consciousness of billions of individual human beings. We must support the efforts of each global citizen, whether in a leadership role or not, to take responsibility for uplifting their consciousness thereby safeguarding the future of our human society and the Earth.”

I cannot do justice to the Worldshift Declaration in such a short post and I would urge all readers who care for the future of this planet – and you must be if you are reading my blogs (!) – to go to their website and study the Declaration, from which I have quoted and drawn the notes above. Also take time to read the individual statements of the council members. And then think: how can I change my own behaviour to help the cause of Worldshift 20? How can I influence those around me in our daily lives of work and play?

I will be returning again and again to the work of Wordshift 20, as I think the ideas it embraces are so fundamentally important to our future survival, the future of the World and Mother Earth herself. The notions they have come up with, of the need for spirit and compassion to infuse our lives, and their recognition of the need for personal responsibility from all the billions of individuals now alive, to make this happen, are central to the theme of my own book. We are entering upon very exciting times. The rewards are enormous if we win – and we cannot afford to lose!

The cult of celebrity

“We think more highly of people such as Simon Cowell than we should do – we’re talking about someone who is essentially trivial. There’s no harm in pop music, but think of the status of classical musicians who earn £70 a gig.”
This is what Lord Robert Winston – Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, popular TV Science programme host and author of more than a dozen books – said in an interview for The Times Magazine for the 4th June 2011.
This celebrity cult, he said, he found depressing.

And I think it is depressing because it has become a huge problem, particularly in the upbringing of our kids, who see celebrities as role models and look up to them in awe, yearning themselves for the same fame and fortune when they grow up.

Sadly this emphasis is also seen too often in the self- help and self-development genre of book that is so popular today. I suspect that quite a few of us have reached in our time to those sections of a library or bookshop tempted by books that promise to ‘change our lives’, or help us ‘succeed’. Many of these are excellent. I have quite a few on my own bookshelves!
But too often they feed the petty ego of self, the selfish desire for individual improvement, the seemingly endless drive for power and wealth. And this style of self-development is often measured by the values of material gain, promotion, or celebrity status. And incidentally the authors are often extremely wealthy and part of the celebrity cult themselves!

Should we not be wary of a self- help industry if it becomes so self-centered on the individual at the expense of others? Doesn’t this approach fuel greed and envy, eschew vulnerability and threaten genuine altruism? I think so.

Unfortunately a huge and profitable industry has built up around this ‘success’ culture. What is more, many such books actively discourage contact with those who are wounded in our society, the vulnerable, the loners, the unhappy, the unsuccessful, the disadvantaged, those who are damaged emotionally. Such weaknesses are too often seen as inhibiting to our own ‘development’.
By not helping such people don’t we dig ourselves deeper into a less attractive future? Don’t we risk divorcing ourselves from experiencing and displaying that empathy and compassion so essential for a better world?

Anglican Bishop Peter Selby observed that ‘the obsessive search for personal growth and inner wholeness without concern for the health of society is distorting.’**
Nowhere is this distortion more obvious, and more potentially harmful than among these books that fuel what has been dubbed the new egocentric ‘Me-Millennium’.

**(Selby, Peter, Liberating God, Private Care and Public Struggle

, London: SPCK, 1983, publisher’s note, back cover.)

“Empathy is a quality of Character that can Change the World” says Obama.

Speaking at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast on May 12th 2011 Obama said that empathy is a source of morality in the immigration reform debate. According to Edwin Rutsch, writing to Members in Let's Find 1 Million People Who Want to Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion, Obama has been talking about empathy and compassion more lately and Edwin thinks it will be central to his 2012 election campaign.
Here is the video posted up as part of Edwin Rutsch’s empathy documentary project. where you will find links to many other videos from Obama and others on the importance of empathy.

Here is some of the text from the video:

"So, yes, immigration reform is a moral imperative, and so it’s worth seeking greater understanding from our faith. As it is written in the Book of Deuteronomy, “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” To me, that verse is a call to show Empathy to our brothers and our sisters; to try and recognize ourselves in one another. ….

That sense of connection, that sense of Empathy, that moral compass, that conviction of what is right is what led the National Association of Evangelicals to shoot short films to help people grasp the challenges facing immigrants. It’s what led the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to launch a Justice for Immigrants campaign, and the Interfaith Immigration Coalition to advocate across religious lines. It’s what led all the Latino pastors at the Hispanic Prayer Breakfast to come together around reform...

I’m asking you to help us recognize ourselves in one another... Obama went on to say ...Empathy is a quality of Character that can Change the World.”

Empathy and Compassion are qualities whose time has come. Here is the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age.

See also Edwin Rutsch's Center for Building a Culture of Empathy
And the Facebook Center for Building a Culture of Empathy and Compassion 
and the cause - Let's Find 1 Million People Who Want to Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion 
and thankyou to the indefatigable Edwin Rutsch who is working so very hard to put all this together and keep it running - and growing!

It is a cause very dear to my own heart and I will be talking in a few days time to a local book group about empathy and compassion and how we need to nurture these qualities in everything we do to heal our broken world.

Reclaiming empathy and compassion for human well being.

BBC Radio 4's Start the Week is an excellent weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday and hosted by Andrew Marr, a man in the news recently for other reasons!

Casting that aside, I pricked up my ears a week or so ago to the programme when The Revd Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James's, Piccadilly,  was speaking - "Human well being," she said, "relies upon reclaiming empathy and compassion." And religious sensibility has a role to play, she continued, in creating the Good Society. Precisely! Regular readers of my blog will know that I also believe empathy and compassion to be at the heart of any attempts to heal our broken world, and I explore this in much more detail in Healing This Wounded Earth - with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope.


It is sometimes reassuring to know that others are on my wavelength!

The photo is of me giving a very successful talk and reading from my book at a  local group.

(The Revd. Winkett is the author of Our Sound is our Wound - Contemplative Listening to a Noisy World , the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book for 2010 - another lovely statement she made: "Don't imagine you're thinking when you're simply rearranging your prejudices." !!)

The Wounded Healer - again

However we define and categorize our wounds, we now know that who we are and how we behave as adults is not only a combination of our inherited gene and possibly also our meme makeup. We are also affected by subsequent influences in our upbringing and our experiences as we develop through childhood and beyond. This is what is meant when we talk about ‘nature versus nurture’.  So as well as our inherited physical characteristics, we pick up mental wounds from the collective experiences of our ancestors. The unhealed wounds of mankind inflicted through millennia of evolution by strife and violence and disaster mean that hundreds of millions of people are psychologically, emotionally and physically scarred and wounded and in need of healing. It has even been suggested by some psychologists that ‘human culture as a whole has been saturated by unhealed wounding, which, if unchecked, will continue on a downward spiral toward inevitable disintegration.’* This is not a good thought. 

Books abound, both popular and academic, on the psychological study of why we behave as we do. But I think the bottom line is that we must understand how our wounds manifest themselves in many different and undesirable personality traits. We see greed and envy, craving for love and attention, consumerism, lust for power, superiority, violence, overspending, addictions to work and substances, depression, cynicism, despair. All these come from our unhealed wounds. What we need to cultivate instead is a compassionate trend, always sensitive to the pain of others. We are wired for empathy - we just shut it out a lot of the time! We need an instinctive urge to support the weak and the vulnerable. And we must combat violence, both against each other and against the planet. Violence is probably threatening our very future more than anything else. And the most obvious violence that we inflict upon this fragile planet is consumerism. That I have written of before, and will do again!

I have just found another good blog commenting on the Wounded Healer.
There the point is made that we can all be Wounded Healers. I cannot wholly agree.

Yes we certainly, most of us, have the capacity to become Wounded Healers, but along with many others, I believe that there are stages of healing along the path to the ultimate Wounded Healer when we can do more harm than good. See for example Conti-O’Hare’s excellent book The Nurse as Wounded Healer where she writes of the “Walking Wounded”, and also http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2004/book-beethoven.htm where Clayton Montez reviews Pearsall’s The Beethoven Factor, and writes on the Thriving Response. And there are other stages. The author of the said blog, writing clearly from a medical healing perspective, confesses to a lack of empathy by the bedside. Yes that is certainly true. There is much that needs to be done to reintroduce empathy and soul back to the sick bed, and I have written at some length on this myself elsewhere, re our health services, following in the footsteps of Larry Dossey, Dawson Church, et al. But I also believe that this archetype of the Wounded Healer has enormous social healing significance beyond the caring professions, for healing the world’s greater woes. I will come back to that in later posts.

*see Judith Thompson and James O'Dea "Social Healing for a Fractured World."

Let’s all do one extra compassionate act today.

I have written over the last week of the dangers of remoteness – not linking our behaviour with the effects of our actions. This remoteness is seen at a global and human level, when we do not always associate the extreme manifestations of climate change happening in other parts of the world with our own excessive and consumer lifestyles.
10% of the world’s population is consuming 50% of its resources. 20% of the world’s population has no safe water supply. Observing our speed limits can save a liter of fuel or more per 100 miles. Are we going to slow down, stop using that pressure hose, cut our consumption?

The IPCC said in 2007 ‘that by 2050 up to 2 billion people worldwide could be facing major water shortages. The U.S. used more than 148 trillion gallons of water in 2000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That includes residential, commercial, agriculture, manufacturing and every other use — almost 500,000 gallons per person.’ Serious water shortages in the US are predicted sooner than 2050, caused by ‘rising temperatures and evaporation rates, lack of rain, urban sprawl, waste and overuse.’
We usually take our potable water supply totally for granted, because we have not experienced for ourselves and cannot begin to imagine having to walk miles each day to carry back pitchers of water that is possibly dirty and harmful to drink. The chronic water shortages that hit parts of the South of England in the summer drought of 2006 provoked a positive response from customers to the requests to save water. This was almost certainly because the threat of water standpipes in the roads was seen as a real possibility that would affect us all directly and make our lives quite difficult.

The same principles could equally apply to any of the other resources that we hold dear to us or take totally for granted, such as food, fuel, power. I feel sure that we would be far more interested in being frugal with such commodities if we could only fully comprehend the real risk of us losing them by our inappropriate actions.
In the UK shock tactics have been used to change public opinion. Celebrity chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have both used powerful documentaries on prime time TV to drive home the message about unacceptable and cruel farming practices.
Do we need celebrities to make television programs or videos with shock tactics about every aspect of our lives before we will act responsibly as individuals? I hope not! Change needs to come from a change of heart, a sense of love and compassion and empathy, rather than by the use of shock tactics.



Someone said to me yesterday: “we cannot do anything at all about atrocities happening in other parts of the world except pray.” I was horrified! At the very least we can find out more about the many wonderful charities and other organizations that are working tirelessly in so many places to improve the lot of humankind, to relieve hunger and suffering and to provide education and support wherever needed. So many of us are very privileged. So many of us don’t really have to worry about where our next meal will come from, and we can take for granted our relative safety in our own secure homes and neighbourhoods. We may not be able to become directly involved with the work of aid agencies etc., but we can at least support them financially as well as in our prayers.

Let’s all do one extra compassionate act today.

The Empathic Civilization

This is a jolly good book, albeit a very hefty read, running as it does to 616 pages in three parts and 15 chapters; not to mention notes and bibliography and index running to a further 60 or so pages.
But the effort will reward the reader. Here is a fascinating history of civilization, but with a difference. It is written from the rather unique perspective of the evolution of human empathy and consciousness, showing how these correlate with the accompanying development of energy usage, from hydraulic power to wind and water mills and finally to our current use of finite fossil fuel resources. This loss of usable energy is called entropy. Rifkin draws on the first and second laws of thermodynamics that in simple terms state that the "total energy content of the universe is constant, and the total entropy is continually increasing." It is clear that our energy usage is unsustainable.
But on a more hopeful note, science is now showing that contrary to widely held views to the contrary, we are wired for empathy. What is more, the first months and early years of a baby's development are crucial to the development of empathy in the child as he grows. So early upbringing is crucial.

Rifkin tells us that we are on the cusp of an Empathic Civilization, with empathy spreading across the globe to embrace all humanity. But at the same time there is a “rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” Will empathy or entropy win, he asks? Can the developed West find a workable cultural, economic and political game plan for a sustainable and equitable future at the same time as the poor countries improve their economic conditions, and all this before we fall into an entropic abyss? “Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?”
The future is very much in our hands, and Rifkin has his own ideas on how we may be able to avert disaster but we have very little time to spare in averting disaster, perhaps no more than a few decades, or a generation.

This is an extremely well researched thesis and I strongly recommend it to anyone who fears for the future of our planet. If you are skeptical or cynical about the current gloomy prognosis for the future of the world, then you should certainly read this book. With Rifkin's persuasive style I would hope that you could be converted to understand the enormous seriousness of the problems we face. I have written a review at Amazon.co.uk and at Amazon.com

I have to say after watching the violence that erupted out of the earlier peaceful demonstrations in Egypt this week, any hope of empathy seems a long way away.

Orchids and Compassion

The above photos were taken in the Greenhouse at Wisley, home of the Royal Horticultural Society in Surrey. But I wanted to link orchids with compassion in line with recent blog postings, and found the following:

Wisdom of Compassion - Phalaenopsis Sussex Silk
This orchid called out gently and clearly for an essence to be made, with its message of compassion for all beings. Made on the full moon anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment. The need for this energy is fully apparent in the world at this time. From Living Tree Orchid Essences at Healing Waters