Companions in Suffering

I had lunch on Sunday with a friend who runs a community project in one of the UK’s more troubled towns.

She was a volunteer in a previous project, which went bankrupt. Everything related to the project was handed over to the receiver and the premises were left unattended.My friend had a key, so she opened up again, illegally, and began serving the poor of her area. So many came that in due course the new project was legitimised, and now serves hundreds of needy people every month.The core of this work, my friend told me over quiche and salad, is a commitment to treat each person who comes through the door as family. Their needs are diverse: food; furniture; baby equipment; company; help with benefit claims and other bureaucratic challenges. But whatever their need, the team are taught to respond to it as they would to a family member.The difference this makes is extraordinary. How many of us who never pick up hitchhikers will do so the instant we recognised them? How different does your neighbour’s sickness / redundancy / poverty / trouble feel when your neighbour is your cousin? To treat other humans as relatives gets to the very heart of compassion, a word widely used but poorly understood.To get to the true meaning of compassion, consider a parallel word — companion. The latin prefix ‘com’ is a short for of ‘common’ — it means to share or ‘have the same as’. ‘Panion’ is derived from the everyday word for bread. My companion is ‘ the one I share bread with’. The word compassion has the same structure — ‘com’: to share and ‘passion’: suffering. I have compassion when I share the suffering of another — that is I volunteer to feel what they feel. I surrender my will and allow my (relative) comfort to be coloured by the invasive entry of their (relative) pain. Compassion does not end, of course, in feelings — it flows into action. but the link is key. When I allow the sufferings of another to affect me as if they were my own, I will tend to act as decisively as I would to relieve my own pain, and if human beings are experts at anything, it is acting to relieve their own pain. Compassion is not pity, and it is not charity. To ‘love’ others from a great height is not compassionate. True compassion is the gift of treating others as I treat myself; of being as shaken by their loss; their hunger; their redundancy as I would be by my own. It challenges the one who is not in pain take on voluntarily a load that another has been forced to carry. None of us can live constantly and exclusively in this mode — we would be consumed by need and pain. But we can ask for a moire compassionate heart; we can make room for compassion; we can ask for the gift of looking less often with indifference. We can try to say, just a little more often, ‘your pain is my pain’.