The miracle of compassion

We find in all the three readings of today’s Holy Mass the miraculous power of God’s loving compassion. In the first reading, through God’s intervention, Elijah felt deep compassion for the widow whose son got seriously ill and died. At the height of the mother’s grief, Elijah’s compassion empowered him to bring back the son to life. The mother exclaimed: “Now indeed I know that you are a man of God” (1 Kgs. 17: 24).

The second reading is about the dramatic conversion of Paul through the compassionate revelation of Jesus Christ. Before this, Paul himself described “how I persecuted the Church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was even more a zealot for my ancestral traditions” (Gal. 1: 13-14). From Saul to Paul, through the Lord’s compassion.

In the Gospel event for today, no less than Christ himself was moved with deep compassion when he saw the dead body of a widow’s only son being carried out for burial. Christ approached the grieving widow, and his heart spoke with the words: “Do not weep.” After that, the compassionate Jesus brought the son back to life and gave him to his mother.

But compassion is done not only through major miracles, as we have read above. In fact, Jesus’ way of life was one of continuing compassion in his teachings, relationships, numerous acts of love, mercy, forgiveness, and all. And this is what he has passed on to us. We are missioned by God to live compassion as our way of life, too. Compassion is no less than the language of the heart that originally comes from two words: “cum” and “pati.” It means to suffer or go through what the other is suffering or going through. One can experience compassion toward a single person, a family, the community-at-large, the whole nation, or even the whole of humanity as the family of God. As humans, we are all related and interconnected with one another under the one and the same Creator-God, who is all-compassionate. The universal Lover.

For instance, the spontaneous response and support of people to the victims of natural disasters is amazing, be it the “Ondoy” here or the recent giant tornado in the US. Moreover, the number of NGO’s and charitable organizations in our country are numerous indeed.

On a more personal level, I have witnessed many quiet, unpublicized little miracles of mutual compassion in my ministry as a professional marital counselor. Allow me to just single out one particular couple who have been married for many years with several children. They often quarrel about certain issues and almost separated twice, if not for their children. They also identified themselves as practicing Catholics, so they finally decided to seek professional counseling.

The wife has a strong personality, and often comes across in their marital relationship as controlling and domineering. This is often manifested in hurting, verbal language, in a loud angry voice. The husband has an equally strong personality, and shows his control by ignoring the wife, with hardly any verbal dialogue, and threatens her with physical violence. This is when she stops, and the problem remains unresolved. In other words, the more she does what she does, the more he does what he does. They are complementing each other in a negative way without mutual awareness.

Sad to say, the wife for the longest time has been hungry for affection and emotional intimacy. The husband, on the other hand, has been longing to be looked up to and respected as the head of the family.

What worked wonders during the counseling process was when they began to experience mutual empathy as facilitated by the counselor. In psycho-spiritual language, this is nothing less than mutual compassion, which was initially described above. I had one individual session with each one of them for initial ventilation and catharsis. This gave me the opportunity as counselor to feel compassion for each one of them.

I then facilitated a conjoint session with the two of them. The first thing I did was to ask the three of us to quiet down, close our eyes, and feel God’s presence within each one of us. I then asked them to be aware of this Divine Presence throughout the whole session. We then began the session by my asking each one of them to be speaker and listener alternately. As speaker, I explained, you are to describe your inner self in I-messages, how the situation is affecting you, without blaming the spouse. As listener, you are to set aside your own opinions, judgements, and feelings, and instead, put yourself in the place of the speaker, so that you can be-with, think-with, and feel-with the other. You will then experience no less than deep compassion for the other.

The mutual compassion for each other that followed was a major breakthrough in the husband-wife relationship. As the counselor, I then facilitated them toward a win-win situation, a happy compromise in their marital relationship.

The husband committed himself to be more externally affectionate, in both verbal and non-verbal ways. The wife, on the other hand, vowed to let go of her domineering ways, let God, and be a more loving and compassionate partner to her husband. A miracle of compassion.

“Be compassionate, as your Heavenly Father is compassionate” (Lk. 6: 36).