Funding Solidarity and Compassion, Not War

In yesterday’s meditations I raised the all-important question, “Can humanity survive without compassion?” 

Of course we can broaden it to ask, “Can the earth as we know it, with all its beautiful and wondrous creatures survive without human compassion?” 

Compassion is the most important energy on earth.  It needs to be mined and developed.  All peoples and all religions need to devote ourselves to that at this perilous time in human and planetary history.

A beautiful story emerged this week born of an evil happening in Chicago when a boy was murdered (and his mother attacked) because he was Muslim.  Five Jewish rabbis, in an act of solidarity, attended the boy’s funeral.*  That is compassion in action. 

Thomas Aquinas teaches that the first effect of love is melting.  The rabbis act melts hatred between religions and peoples and acknowledges the “fellowship of all peoples” that Howard Thurman promoted.  With the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza, let this be a lesson for those who prefer murder to caring.

America is talking of giving $10 billion to Israel for its military defense.  And $100 million to Palestinians for their civic needs.  The proportion of these numbers tell a story of what is wrong in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Isn’t it time to think of “defense” as defense against humanity’s darkest angels and the shadows we carry around inside of us?  Isn’t defense about more than tanks and bombs and rockets?  Isn’t it time to finance ways to deconstruct hatred?  And defuse violence?  And eliminate poverty such as Gaza has been mired in for generations?

And defending Mother Earth from corporate rape and wars? 

Humanity has to move from the reptilian brain option (“I win, you lose”) which patriarchy is so enamored of, to funding our powers of compassion, caring and emptying, what Thurman called being “stripped to the literal substance of ourselves before God.” 

We need to invest more in compassion and less in spirals of violence. Our only future is compassion.

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* https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/rabbis-attend-funeral-of-palestinian-american-boy-killed-in-hate-crime

See Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion.

And Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors To Awaken the Sacred Masculine.

Banner image: Compassion. Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash

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Queries for Contemplation

Do you agree that humanity’s only future and the only future for the Earth as we know it in all its diversity and wonder is Compassion?  What follows from that?

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Recommended Reading

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

In A Spirituality Named Compassion, Matthew Fox delivers a profound exploration of the meaning and practice of compassion. Establishing a spirituality for the future that promises personal, social, and global healing, Fox marries mysticism with social justice, leading the way toward a gentler and more ecological spirituality and an acceptance of our interdependence which is the substratum of all compassionate activity.
“Well worth our deepest consideration…Puts compassion into its proper focus after centuries of neglect.” –The Catholic Register

The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine

To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature,  to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God