Conscious Choice: Radical Acts of Love

December 2001

Radical Acts of Love

How compassion is transforming our world

by Susan Skog

We neglect the positive value of affection.... Though the knowledge of our brain is developing, the other human quality — the good heart — is not catching up. Because of this knowledge becomes more destructive, more negative. Today the world is very complicated, and much suffering has happened due to lack of human sympathy and human affection.— The Dalai Lama

Throughout the ages, compassion has been seen as a fire that burns away injustice and hatred, a flame that purifies and delivers us to our highest selves. We all can rekindle this radical fire in our own lives. We can align with our true natures. For at least a century, we’ve developed and focused on our intellectual savvy, on our cerebral brilliance — and now it’s time to master our compassion if we’re ever to find peace personally and as a culture.

What would it take? Let’s begin to dream this into existence. Let’s leave the left, analytical brain aside for a while, and let’s dream a bit on the right side of the brain. Let’s dream what that more enlightened place would look and feel like....

Seeing Others as Our Teachers

I remember talking once with a woman at a mind-body-spirit conference who said she’d had the most amazing transformation. She said she used to live in a world where everything and everyone seemed to disappoint her. The checker in the grocery store would be rude. Her boyfriend would be demanding at the end of the day. The woman who cut her hair was surly. Her kids’ friends often dumped on her and were obnoxious. And then, she kept stumbling across books that explored how the world is often a mirror of our own thoughts and actions, that we attract what we give out to the world. As Creative Visualization author Shakti Gawain says, "My true relationship is with myself — all others are simple mirrors of it."

And this woman saw herself with new eyes. She realized how often she gave to the world a surly, demanding, rude attitude. She remembered how often she judged other people by their outer appearance, how often she cut off others in traffic or cut people down with her thoughts. She remembered the times she was too demanding and snapped at her co-workers — or cursed them inwardly — if they didn’t measure up to her impossible standards. And she realized that all the rude people she kept encountering were showing her what she was offering up to the world. They were holding up her reflection. They were also her wonderful teachers in showing her that there was a better way to be in the world.

As Luke says in Chapter 6, verse 38 of his Gospel: "Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be poured into your lap; because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back."

We all have ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows, says Elizabeth Kim in Ten Thousand Sorrows. Try to see those around you as kindred souls who experience the same sorrows and joys that you do, as like you in every way that counts. Your life will never be the same.

When Margo Hunt began to see those around her as holy, a profound transformation occurred. For forty years, she worked in the visa section of a busy consulate. For a long, long time, the work was sheer drudgery. The person on the other side of the glass was just a customer, and their relationship was solely an exchange of papers with some anxiety on the part of the visa applicant.

"Then I had this whole change of attitude," Hunt says. "It was a spiritual change. I realized I wasn’t talking to a customer, it was someone with a life, someone very much like myself.

"What I needed to apply was love. I needed to care about the fact that they may be afraid and I could do something to change that. I could help them by saying something as simple as,‘Let me show you what this is about."’

Hunt ended her career with letters of praise from those she touched. "I had an interesting career, and I realized that none of it mattered except how I treated people."

Suspending Judgment and Criticism

As we work to change our systems — of medicine, government, and so on — we have to be compassionate to those working within them. Try to see and support with greater empathy and authentic compassion. Maybe the grocery store clerk, who scans our tomato soup with such a frenzy it makes our teeth rattle, is having a bad month, not just a bad day. Maybe she can’t pay her rent, her kids are home sick, and she wishes life would just get better. If we see people with the eyes of empathy, our hearts can reach out and connect, with no words said, on a spiritual level. When we see people in their pain and wish and hope and pray that they will be supported and surrounded with love, a shift occurs. And that’s, of course, the meaning of all of our life’s work, isn’t it? Whether we sell gas, serve up lattes, feed children, or litigate divorces, our call is to see all life as precious.

Mourning What We’ve Created

To develop soft, strong hearts then, we must fully look at the suffering we’ve created. We can’t live compassionately until we allow our hearts to break wide open, until we fully recognize, mourn, and take responsibility for the world we’ve created. We must mourn and grieve, for instance, that because of our actions, thousands of children die every year from guns left in their homes. Because of our choices, the coral reefs in the oceans are disappearing a little each day. Thousands of species are dying, leaving the earth forever. This affects us in ways we can’t begin to quantify in our greatest ivory-towered labs.

When we finally see that the world is broken in many ways, and so breaks open a part of us, we can better mend it. Then, when the heart begins to feel again, pain and all, it begins to yearn for something more, something better. It longs to come home to a more tender, natural place. And we can become agents for healing with our more awakened, enlightened, honest hearts.

Says environmental activist Joanna Macy in Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, "The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.... All is registered in the‘boundless heart’ of the bodhisattva. Through our deepest and innermost responses to our world — to hunger and torture and the threat of annihilation — we touch that boundless heart."

Follow Your Anger

Sometimes the first way we awaken is to become angry, outraged. And it’s often our own suffering that makes us enraged at the injustice we see around us. We open our hearts through the anger we feel when we bear witness to others’ unnecessary suffering. Anger, sacred anger, can be a good thing. "Follow your anger, it will take you to what you love," says Matthew Fox.

History is rich with examples of people who followed their anger when they bore witness to others’ senseless suffering. "I am constantly angry about what is happening to the children," says Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, director of World Centers of Compassion for Children. Channeled directly, anger can be used to spark and galvanize movements, Williams knows.

Her anger was ignited on August 10, 1976, when the then thirty-four-year-old mother of two young children was sickened by the violence in her Belfast, Ireland, community. On that day a getaway car carrying a gunman from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) went out of control when its driver was fatally shot by pursuing British soldiers. The racing car slammed into Anne Maguire and her three young children, who were just out walking in the sunshine. Williams heard the sickening sound of the car smashing into an iron fence and ran to see what had happened.

Williams was the first on the scene. When she looked down, she saw two young children dead, another mortally wounded, and their mother critically hurt. Anger and heartsickness at what had happened led Williams to take a stand against violence. Within only two days, she canvassed her neighbors and collected 6,000 signatures on a petition that demanded peace and a stop to the violence.

In a local television broadcast, she appealed to both Protestant and Catholic women to join with her and demand that the fighting stop. Anne Maguire’s sister Mairead Corrigan came forward after the broadcast, and together, she and Williams organized a peace march of 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women. The marchers were physically assaulted by members of the IRA, but they succeeded in their goal to make it to the gravesites of the three Maguire children. A week later, another march attracted 35,000 people.

In 1976, Williams was jointly honored with Corrigan as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for their grassroots work that spawned the Northern Ireland Peace Movement.

"The truth is I did it for purely selfish reasons," Williams said. "[My children’s] names are Debra and Paul. I didn’t want my babies to be brought up in a society that was destroying children."

Now, Williams continues to effect change and create safe havens for children in the midst of war through the World Centers organization. She has traveled the world five times spreading her message. She organized the Mothers of the Earth for World Peace conferences in 1997 and 1998. She counts the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu among her friends.

All this from following her anger and suffering to bring greater light. One of her messages is about the power of transforming our pain with our action. "Tears without action are wasted sentiment" is her philosophy.

Each of us has to be willing to be a full-fledged, outspoken advocate for shaping our institutions into organizations and gatherings that take care of and nurture our hearts. We can’t wait for someone else to do something. We’ve waited too long as it is. We each have to seed this new radical acts of love movement.

Daunting? Yes. Impossible? Not at all. Upon reading these stories so far, you might have found yourself incredulous, saying, "I could never do that. I’m not that powerful." And you might have listed all the other things you lack that prevent you from becoming a heart activist in the truest, hugest sense. You may feel you don’t have the spiritual strength, the physical stamina, or the emotional balance, skills, confidence, contacts, hours in the day, and so on to really live out of your heart. But by the time you even begin to consider going into your heart, you are already no longer the same person you were before. You have already remade yourself with greater creativity, stamina, soul, and power than before. You are already someone who can accomplish feats you could never have before. Love is such an uplifting force that we can become heart activists who surmount our fears, our physical fatigue, and our own crippling self-doubts.

A Vision of the New World

The previous decades have been dedicated to the power of our minds and intellects. We’ve tried to solve our problems, come together as a nation, and heal our most painful issues through our greatest intellects. One side brings together its greatest minds and slings one accusation; another gathers another stellar group and hurls something else. As this all plays out, I keep remembering the spiritual words of folk singer and award-winning performer Emmylou Harris: "The world is not going to change unless it’s changed one heart at a time, one person at a time. All these movements,...you can talk about anything, you can legislate all you want, but nothing is going to change until you change yourself and you change your heart. Because, ultimately everything gets back to the heart, everything."

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