The more one loves the deeper the understanding that leads to compassion and empathy. Self knowledge is the royal road leading to sympathy for self, blocking off the tendency to run from others and their pain, through hatred, contempt and the use of violence. Self righteous indignation flows from a lack of understanding of one’s own heart and its tendencies, often buried below layers of repression.
To seek to love ones self leads to dissolution of the ego that creates false barriers of “them” and “us”; a natural tendency that keeps us tied to our less than human state. Our inner prisons give us security, while the world outside is falling apart, becoming ever more fragmented the longer we fight the Image we are made in. We are never more ourselves than when we love, reach out and have compassion on those outside our group.
Our ignorance of our need for healing, leads to an inner cringing that is seen as normal, barring us from seeing our own self destructive behaviors not only towards ourselves but others as well. The heart is made to be a garden brought about by love. Often what we have is an inner desert devoid of life, propelling us to frenzied activity to escape the inner void.
I seek to be more human, but fall short all the time, for my heart is still mostly stone, given to inner tension and neurotic behaviors that wound me even more. Then there is the wounding of Love that shows me my state when I am left to myself. This self knowledge can bring about something more than despair. Hope can flourish, because it brings the knowledge that we are loved and accepted. This allows change to happen; I call it grace. When I know of my own fragmentation…. my being pulled in so many directions and my failures, then with this knowledge, how can I judge others? I do not have the right to denigrate another human being. I am not worse than I am because I have not been tempted to be so. If tempted, then I think I am capable of anything no matter how cruel or evil.
It is grace that expands my heart, for I am and I believe we are all pursued by loves insistence quest; it is what calls us to move forward, to not fear, and to embrace the pain and suffering of others without the escape of negative emotions that wall us apart from one another.
Jesus was fully human, bearing all of our pain and injustice and our deaths. He took our souls to the cross and died with us and for us. He said just before he died, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; is the spoken word of one who is truly, fully human. Love suffers; most humans know the price that love entails. Infinite love suffers in an infinite manner something yet to be comprehended by mankind. For who among us could bear it?
Imagine if I could actually live that out, to finally understand what Christ Jesus was about. No there yet, but I strive not allowing my failures to deter me, but hopefully to continue to allow me to grow in empathy, compassion and love, for the struggles of all my brothers and sister who seek truth.
Br. Mark Dohle, OCSO
Holy Spirit Monastery
