Compassion in Action | August 17, 2025 | Rev. Dr. Kathryn Benton

The opening video was filmed at an event I attended in Los Angeles last year. An audience member confronted Gabor Maté about his description of the various levels of compassion.  This apparently ‘triggered’ a response from an Israeli in the audience. She brought up the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Trying to put that event in an historical context, Maté exercised a heroic amount of restraint, considering his own history. Maté, a retired physician and important teacher of mine, is a holocaust survivor, as well as, a former Zionist. He has also devoted his life to understanding other points of view and employing what he calls the Compassionate Inquiry approach. This is an approach to sitting with people. The levels of compassion he identifies are as follows:

* An awareness of suffering

* Emotional resonance

* A desire to relieve suffering

* Taking action

* Extending compassion to oneself and others

This is, I think, a blueprint for moving out of a frozen stance…of a place of shut down that so many of us may be experiencing, and certainly what that woman in the audience last year was voicing. Calling the Palestinian people, animals, she is clearly mired in a sense of hate of the other, which allows us to violate them. Howard Thurman dealt with this on so many levels, for example in the book Disciplines of the Spirit he wrote:

Hate is the great insulator, making it possible for one person

to deny the existence of another or to will their nonexistence.

Thurman, of course, also devoted an entire chapter in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited, to both hate and to love. Calling hate one of the hounds of hell that dog our existence, Thurman says that it has as its origin, contact without fellowship…or unsympathetic understanding that is expressed in ill will and eventually hatred walking on earth. Thurman uses the example of a child in a family who always gets the short end of the stick. He describes this child as building up resentments and hatred which becomes a source of validation for the personality. Thurman finally draws the conclusion that hate destroys the hater. Meanwhile though, we know, the hatred can do a great deal of damage. It is happening now all over the world and Maté was confronting it with that woman in the audience at the conference. He described what Howard Thurman described…the way we can become hatred walking on earth and no longer be capable of compassion for our fellows.

Thurman writes that Jesus rejected hatred…he rejected it because it causes death to the mind and spirit and death to communion with our very creator who clearly created us in love not hate. This is what Thurman and others call the love-ethic…what Dr. King called this the core of non-violent resistance…the love which is extended to all, for as Matthew 5:45 points out, the sun rises on both the evil and the good…in other words, we are all connected, and when we harden our hearts to one, we are hardening our hearts to all, including ourselves. If we think about it this is evident in all our relationships. When we shut another out, we are no longer able to respond with the compassion that Maté spoke of. We are not able to access the emotional resonance necessary for action…for extending compassion to ourselves and others. Thurman tells us that there are at least two ways of looking at the experience of love…

The experience of love is either a necessity or a luxury. If it be a luxury, it is expendable; if it be a necessity, then to deny it is to perish. So simple is the reality, and so terrifying. Ultimately there is only one place of refuge on this planet for any person – that is in another person’s heart.

To love is to make of one’s heart a swinging door.

It is this swinging door that we are hoping to develop as loving souls, capable of true compassion…of feeling with another person.

In Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman concludes the chapter on love by discussing forgiveness. He says that before love can operate, there is a necessity for forgiveness. He said this is because: 1. God forgives us again and again for what we do intentionally and unintentionally. 2. No evil deed represents the full intent of the doer. 3. The evildoer does not go unpunished. Life is its own restraint.

…it will become increasingly clear that the contradictions of life are not ultimate. [We] will know for [ourselves] that there is a Spirit at work in life and in the hearts of people which is committed to overcoming the world. It is universal, knowing no age, no race, no culture, and no condition of people…if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and discipline, they can live effectively in the chaos of the present the high destiny of a child of God.

May we face the chaos of the present moment with the Strength to Love…the strength of our ancestors who knew that turning to hatred was only a way to death…to the killing of the spirit. Instead, we must keep open our hearts to the suffering of the world…to cultivate the emotional resonance necessary to desire the common good and to take action. May we respond to this present moment by extending compassion to ourselves and to others, rather than standing by and becoming frozen. The following words from Dr. Dorsey Blake seem to summon the love…the hope that we need. He wrote:

The annals of human history…reveal that God acts in life – confronting traditions, cultural realities, social systems, and personal behavior – in behalf of justice and empowers those who make the suffering of others their own. Self preservation is not the guiding force of human concern. The light reflected through the ages by those who have lost themselves – their egos and often their lives – for the sake of others declares something quite different. They have conjoined the temporal and the eternal. Their lives have registered as saviors of humankind, saviors of God.

Dr. Blake then quotes W.E.B. Dubois in a piece entitled The Prayers of God:

Thou?

Thee?

I lynched Thee!

Awake me, God! I sleep!

What was that awful word Thou saidst?

That black and riven thing – was it Thee?

That gasp – was it Thine?

This pain – is it Thine?

Are, then, these bullets piercing Thee?

Have all the wars of all the world,

Down all dim time, drawn blood from Thee?

Have all the lies and thefts and hates—

Is this Thy Crucifixion, God,

And not that funny, little cross,

With vinegar and thorns?

Is this Thy kingdom here, not there,

This stone and stucco drift of dreams?

Help!

I sense that low and awful cry—

Who cries?

Who weeps?

With silent sob that rends and tears—

Can God sob?

Who prays?

I hear strong prayers throng by,

Like mighty winds on dusky moors—

Can God pray?

Prayest Thou, Lord, and to me?

Thou needest me?

Thou needest me?

Thou needest me?

Poor, wounded soul!

Of this I never dreamed. I thought—

Courage, God,

I come!

May we hear the sound of our creator…in the winds, in the air, in the creatures and plants…in the water.