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The true center of human nature is compassion.

I think it is fair to say that we have seen that in response to hurricane Katrina.  People have opened their wallets to send relief to a Gulf Coast people that can only be described as in a diaspora. People have opened bedrooms in their homes to offer them up to anyone who needs a place to stay. Concerts have been organized. Churches have responded. Major corporations sent down supplies.

We have seen a remarkable outpouring of loving kindness. We have seen doctors, full of compassion, leave their towns and head to the gulf coast.  The Unitarian Universalist Association and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee have seen a million dollars come in just for their Gulf Coast initiative.

What is this thing compassion? That is what I would like us to consider this morning. Compassion is the ability to see me in you and you in me.

Two quick little stories. John Bowman came to me Wednesday night and said, “There was a Sufi mystic who wrote about Jesus, to teach his people what Jesus was all about. And the story is that Jesus was yelled at by a group of folks who decided that they were the moral guardians of the law. And he, as was his way, turned the other cheek.  Later, his disciples said to him, “Wait a minute. We would have been all up in that guy’s face. Why didn’t you yell back?”  And Jesus said, “I can only pay with the coins that are in my pocket.”  I’ve thought about that a lot since John told me that story, and I’ve looked long and hard at what coins are in my pocket. What coins are in your pocket?

 

Another story is from the Native American tradition, I think, from the Cherokee nation. I heard this story from Rev. Arvid Straube. He said that a tribal leader was speaking one day to his grandson. There is a great battle, child, raging in my body. And it is terrible. And it involves two wolves. And one wolf is fear and anger and hatred. And the other wolf is generosity and love and compassion. And they are fighting inside me, as they fight inside all people.   The little boy thought about this. It is really quite an image. And after a while he asked. Who wins?  And the old man said to the child: The one you feed.  I’ve thought about that a long time too. How is your wolf diet? Which are you feeding?  Who wins?

This morning I want to briefly hit on four key statements that will help on the interpersonal front. And later, I’ll talk about social compassion.

 

 

 

First, the interpersonal.

Sometimes, words fail us. Sometimes, we don’t think we have the imagination to come up with a caring, compassionate response. Imagination is key to the whole enterprise of constructing a compassionate life. Consider the case of Ian O’Gorman, a ten year old boy in Oceanside, California, who was diagnosed with cancer. He entered into ten weeks of chemotherapy, during which, they warned him, all his hair would fall out. So Ian decided that he would take matters into his own hands and he cut off all his hair.  Ian, a few days later, returned to school, bald, and found that the thirteen other boys in his class, and their teacher, greeted him with heads completely shaved.  

Sometimes, we don’t know if we can follow through and so willfulness is important. Consider the case of Margot.  Margot, by any measure, is a remarkable hero among the legions of resisters in Nazi Germany. She was the wealthy only child of the head of GM in Western Europe. She was trained as a diplomat, but she moved to Holland in protest of the Nazi policies. She was part of the resistance and was imprisoned 6 or 7 times. She described the little straw that prisoners had to sleep on, how they were mistreated by guards, how one girl died, and how Margot herself ran afoul of the authorities, when she stuck out her tongue at one of the guards. The story ends with an account of one of the Jewish women being taken out to be killed. As she was leaving, the woman turned to Margot and asked, If you get out, find my husband and sons and tell them what happened to me. See that my sons grow into good men.” When Margot left prison the first thing she did—after determining that her own daughters were safely hidden in a convent under assumed names—was try to find out what happened to that woman’s family. The husband and sons were still in prison, but Margot was able to get the husband some food and a message about his wife. He and his sons were being shipped out that night to a concentration camp and he was grateful for news of his wife, even though the news was bad.  The fellow wrote to Margot, she received a mud-stained letter from him some time later. It had been delivered by a Dutch railroad worker, who had retrieved it from the sludge in the freight yards after seeing it thrown thru the slots in a passing cattle car. I carried that letter with me for years, Margot said, until the paper it was written on disintegrated.

 

The letter in her pocket, like the  coins in Jesus pocket, defined who she was, allowed her to remember her compassion, to remember her open heart, to know something about her true self. The center of human nature is compassion.

Now, most of our lives do not involve opportunity for such dramatic stories around compassion. But, suffering is suffering. And invitations to be in compassionate relationship are all around. There are four questions that I want to offer up that will, I believe, nurture in you a diet for the compassionate wolf inside you, that will add to your coins of compassion in your pocket. Those four statements are

Thank you.

I love you.

How are you?

What do you need?

Let’s practice those, real quick.

Thank you.

I love you.

How are you?

What do you need?

 

Action flows from identity, from our most basic sense of who we are. It is also our view of ourselves in relation to others that determines how we treat people.

 

Our identity, as Unitarian Universalists, suggests that all people are one, that all people have a spot at the welcome table, as the hymn suggests.  Our universalist forebears believed that no one was outside God’s love. It is why our Universalist forebears, so early in their history, produced a statement against slavery.

The earliest written statement by Unitarians or Universalists is in the Articles of Faith and Plan of Church Government composed and adopted by the churches believing in the Salvation of all Men (Universalist), May 25, 1790, Chapter III, Recommendations, Section 3.  Of Holding Slaves:

We believe it to be inconsistent with the union of the human race in a common Saviour, and the obligations to mutual and universal love which flow from that union, to hold any part of our fellow-creatures in bondage.  We therefore recommend a total refraining from the African trade, and the adoption of prudent measures for the gradual abolition of slavery of the negroes in our country, and for the instruction and education of their children in English literature, and in the principles of the Gospel.

 

Which brings us to social compassion.

I want to briefly touch on social compassion, by telling you about Rafael Lemkin, the father of the United Nations Convention on Genocide.

Raphael Lemkin

The concept of peace constitutes an incredible awareness of the circumstances that allow all living things to exist comfortably in their state of being. Achieving peace requires an active input from all individuals. Often the effort put forth by one individual will significantly influence the way others approach their struggle and and affect their understanding of peace through actions or by introducting a concept. The Polish-born lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, is one such individual who has accomplished this type of effort on an international scale.

With glasses, blue eyes, and tall stature, Raphael Lemkin was multi-talented and could paint a beautiful landscape, play a decent game of checkers, and fish all day. Among his hobbies, Lemkin held within him a deep concern for the dignity and right to life that is common among all individuals. He made his concern known worldwide by developing the word genocide to describe the deliberate destruction of a racial, ethnic, or religious group.

Lemkin was born to Jewish parents on June 24, 1901, on a farm in Eastern Poland. Until the age of fourteen, Lemkin, with his two brothers, were educated mainly in the humanities by their mother, tutors, and the family library. Lemkin wrote that his mother was "a brilliant intellectual…Somehow, she saw to it we had a tendency to practice what we were learning." Before entering legal training, Lemkin studied philology at the University of Lwow in Poland and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He spoke nine languages and read fourteen. He also studied in France and Italy. Lemkin called law a "social engineering," because "law gives you an instrument to influence society by the way of formulation."

After deciding on a career in law and earning his doctorate, Lemkin became a public prosecutor for the District Court of Poland (1929-1934), and represented Poland at international conferences in many countries. He taught law at Tachkimoni College in Warsaw, and became secretary of the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Polish Republic (1929-1935).

At a young age Lemkin was upset by the mass murder of two groups of people. The slaughter of Armenians by Turks during World War I and the massacre of Christian Assyrians by Iraqis in 1933 caused Lemkin to wonder why such inhuman acts were allowed to occur. He began to focus his attention on these heinous acts and examined them as crimes. Writing on the subject and drawing up a document to outlaw "acts of barbarism and vandalism," he then presented his proposal before the Legal Council of the League of Nations in Madrid. He urged the adoption of his proposal as an instrument for the protection of minorities; but the council refused. Dr. Lemkin's efforts towards this cause in Madrid were not looked upon favorably by the Polish government, which at that time was pursuing a policy of conciliation with Nazi Germany. He eventually retired from his public position and went into private law practice in Warsaw (1934-1939).

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. During the fighting outside the city of Warsaw, Lemkin was wounded in the left leg and for six months he hid in the Polish forests, finally escaping to Sweden by way of Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. He and his brother Elias were the only surviving members of the Lemkin family which contained over forty members. During 1940-1941 Lemkin taught at the University of Sweden in Stockholm, and also began the work of compiling documents on Nazi rule in the occupied countries of Europe. After making his way to the United States via Russia, Japan, and Canada, Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941. During the summer of 1942 he lectured at the School of Military Government at Charlottesville University in Virginia. He also wrote Military Government in Europe, which was a preliminary version of his more fully developed publication, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. From 1942-1943 Dr. Lemkin was appointed chief consultant of the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration and later became a special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department.

In 1944 his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, was published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In the words of Professor Lemkin's preface, the book was designed to provide "undeniable and objective evidence regarding the treatment of the subjugated peoples of Europe by the Axis powers." In this book the word genocide was first used, which Lemkin had compounded from the Greek genos (race) and the Latin cide (killing) to describe the policy of "destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group." He further defined the concept as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." In commenting on the long history of wars of extermination, Lemkin concluded that the modern objectives were for "the disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups."

Material from Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was used in establishing a basis for the Nuremberg War Trials, and Lemkin was appointed an adviser to the Nuremberg Trial Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Since the Nuremberg trials handled cases of war guilt only and genocide in times of peace was not punishable under those terms, Lemkin resolved to carry on the campaign that he had begun in Poland in 1933 for the establishment of genocide as a crime under international law.

He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1945, but was unable to persuade the delegates to adopt such a measure. Lemkin continued to write and speak on the subject though. Many called him a dreamer and fanatic, but he persuaded United Nations delegates to propose and support a resolution naming genocide a crime under international law. In 1946 the UN General Assembly approved the resolution and directed the formulation of an international treaty to that effect. The UN Economic and Social Council, with Lemkin as adviser, rewrote the draft and in December 1948, in Paris, the UN General Assembly approved the international treaty by a vote 55 to 0.

In an article that appeared in the New York Times, the document was called durable and stated that "the genocide treaty is a triumph of one man's ideal over cynicism." By the terms of the treaty, genocide is established as a crime, punishable in an international penal tribunal;and the crime is defined as the mass murder or persecution of a group for reasons of race, religion or culture. The treaty, which is binding only on countries that ratify it, provides for the punishment of responsible individuals, "whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals." The new international pact became a part of international law on October 16, 1950.

In 1950 and 1952 Raphael Lemkin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the Grand Cross of Cespedes from Cuba (1950) and the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress (1951). He died on August 28, 1959. Lemkin often indicated that reading Tolstoy in his youth had affected him deeply. He commented, "Tolstoy taught me to live an idea." And living an idea, is what Raphael Lemkin undertook to the fullest extent.

 

His full story is available in the book by Samantha Power entitled A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. This is an important book. The point is this. Social compassion takes perserverance and power. The Buddhist figure of Compassion, Tara, is a woman, born of a single tear, with many limbs, many arms and legs, sitting on a lion. Kind of an interesting thing, Why is she sitting on a lion. Because compassion, at least in its social form, takes commitment and power and perserverance.

It takes something like this.

Ann Herington told me a story the other day. You know, she and her husband John, have two precious, beautiful daughters, Dianne and Hannah. They are __ and __ years old. And you know she lives on the edge of our village. And she told me that in order to save their own lives, in order to keep John from being slaughtered and in order to keep Ann from being brutally raped and tortured that they are forced to send their beautiful daughters, because they are deemed too young to be raped by the janjaweed, they send Dianne and Hannah to the well every morning to fetch water. Oh, that wasn’t Ann and John, that is the story of a family in Darfur! But it is happening. And we are just sitting by. We are just letting it occur.

Forget blaming. Forget pity (I was listening to Wait, wait don’t tell me, the news quiz show on NPR, yesterday, and they were in Chapel Hill and the Chicago host was down there talking to North Carolina novelist Lee Smith and he said to her, Now I’ve heard that it is true that you can say any terrible thing you want about someone down here, Poor Pitiful Beatrice, as long as you say Bless her heart after it. She’s so overweight, bless her heart!) Pity creates distance, compassion enables you to put yourself in the life of the other. Ann and John are Sudanese. Ron and Marcy are Sudanese. I am. You are. And as long as they are being murdered and raped and tortured, so am I. So are you.

It is true what you’ve heard. If fate brings suffering to one member, the others cannot stay at rest.

Examine the coins in your pocket. See what your feeding the warring wolves in your spirit. Feed the generous compassionate wolf. Find the coins of compassion and fill up your pockets.

May it be so.