I Can Guarantee Human Connection

Compassion doesn’t come easily, but once it does, connection comes naturally.

As we fill Dixie cups, a homeless man approaches us.

The summer morning has dawned like God plucked up a day from early autumn and plunked it down at the beginning of July. The sky crayon-blue. The air crisp. The sun a caress. It’s perfect weather for our town’s annual 5k race. My wife is running. My two youngest kids and I are volunteering at a water table.

The man has only a few teeth remaining in his gappy smile. He’s jovial in that unnatural way that makes you nervous about what he might have been using. He starts drinking water and chatting about the weather. My kids treat him like he’s one of us. He wishes us a good day and walks on, laughing about something we can’t see.

The night before, my oldest son returned home from Chicago. He told us the Narcan he carries in his pocket on others’ behalf came in handy the day before, when he encountered a homeless man on the sidewalk who’d overdosed. Aidan administered the emergency narcotic, called 9-1-1, and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

“I’ll have some kids and teach them that we are all the same,” Zach Bryan says in a poem on his new album, “we’re sufferin’, smilin’, silhouettes of every passin’ day.”

Mission accomplished: my kids know we’re all just suffering and (sometimes toothlessly) smiling silhouettes of the days we’ve lived, and some of us have lived harder days than others. You don’t hold that against anyone. In fact, you hold it for them when you can. Sometimes you even hold a little relief out to them, in a Dixie cup, or a shot of Narcan.

See the Thing Beneath the Thing

Pity, sympathy, and compassion are not created equally.

Pity creates distance. It feels sorry for the other and wishes their predicament could be another way, but the wish comes from way over here, where we are without such a predicament.

Pity is self-containing—the whole act of it is complete in a twinge of regret on someone else’s behalf.

Sympathy is softer, but it’s not compassion either. Sympathy is sensitivity to someone’s pain, along with some subtle relief that we’re not all the way in the pain with them. There’s a reason they’re called sympathy cards and not compassion cards.

Sympathy can be sent. Compassion crosses chasms.

The Latin root of the word compassion literally translates as, “to suffer with.” To be in pain with. To somehow find some solidarity in the common ground of our human condition. From Loveable:

Peter Rollins tells the parable of a rich Texas oilman who discovers he has a long-lost cousin in Ireland named Seamus, whom he then travels to meet. When the oilman arrives, Seamus begins showing his rich cousin around his humble property. After the short tour, the oilman boasts, “You should see my land in Texas. I can’t even drive my car to the edges of it.” Seamus hears his comparison and recognizes it for what it is—competition, bluster, and self-promotion. And he sees the fractured humanity it is meant to obscure. So, Seamus looks at his cousin, nods in understanding, and says, “Yeah, my car is broken too.”

Compassion is what happens when we see the pain beneath the protection.

The hard life beneath the gap-toothed smile. The despair beneath the overdose. The broken car beneath the boasting. And, as

Lissa Rankin, MD

points out in her article about the commitment of compassion, it’s hard to truly see another person’s pain with compassion until you can see your own.

When the Runner Screams At You

Fifteen minutes into the 5k, one of my son’s high school acquaintances acts like a high schooler and slaps the water from our hands as he runs by, so we’re left empty-handed for the runners immediately following him. One of those runners is an older man who reaches for a cup and comes up empty. I smile and start to apologize for our lack, but he cuts me off, unleashing a scolding tirade as he runs past.

My first impulse is to be defensive and shout back something like, “Dude, you’re running a mediocre time in a relatively tiny race, chill out!”

Thanks to my kids’ compassionate example, though, my prevailing impulse is to feel the man’s pain via my own pain—all the moments in my own life in which I’ve been thirsty for attention and care, only to discover that the people who were supposed to relieve my thirst didn’t have any relief to give. I feel compassion for everyone’s thirst. I feel compassion for everyone who’s had the cups knocked out of their hands. I feel compassion for the runner who, at least for this moment, chose the safety of his protections over the solidarity of his pain.

“Here is what we seek,” writes Father Gregory Boyle, “a compassion that can stand in awe at what (others) have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”

It doesn’t take two to do that kind of tango. You can feel deeply connected to a complete stranger, even while they walk off laughing at something you can’t see, even while they lay there unconscious on the sidewalk with the ambulance still a long way off, even while they try to make you feel terrible for doing your best.

Compassion doesn’t come easily, but once it does, connection comes naturally.

When compassion becomes our default response, connection becomes our default reality.

Face the protection.

Find the pain.

Feel the connection.

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