Avalokitesvara Meets Aristotle, or Metta in the Modern World

The other night we were talking about the Fifth Commandment. As with everything else, Catholics have a rich understanding of the larger meaning of this rule. One direction it got me thinking, since it has always been the focus of my own spiritual path, is about compassion, or gentleness, or love, as one's abiding principle. Though this is not a specifically Catholic position, there is room for it within orthodoxy. I can believe the Church's position on just war, for example, but in searching my own conscience find no examples in history or current events in which this doctrine has been put into action.

But sticking (at least for the moment) to absolute orthodoxy, within the Catechism itself the Commandment's proscription against murder is understood to extend to anger. Anger construed in its active sense as wishing another ill is, I think, fairly obviously the opposite of charity/caritas, which is itself the active version of love or, viewed differently, the inevitable fruit of compassion. In this view, there is some transactional quality behind even the impulse to charity, inasmuch as it would seem to me that, lacking the ability to feel the other's position, being therefore unable genuinely to embrace empathy or compassion, there is no soil for mercy or charity to grow in. It is not simply a matter of 'If A then B,' which is, if you believe it, rather a lot by itself, making charity not merely a result but an inextricable concomitant of compassion and love. It is as well the understanding that 'If not A then not B,' -- and 'If not B then clearly not A.'

In this framework, my good works evidence my love, and lack of love, by contrast, confers a quite different meaning on ostensible works of charity. I argued tonight that once someone internalizes this comprehensive compassion there are certain acts that the person will never be able to do, there are certain choices that will never again have to be made. It is a different way of being, a different way of interacting with the world. If one has reached the point of being able to see the Divine, the Buddha-nature - or in Quaker terms, the Inner Light - within others, the point of being able readily to relate to another's suffering, it is not a matter of choosing not to strike. Certain reactions do not arise, and therefore certain responses are precluded a priori. They are precluded unconsciously, actually, since the mind does not have to go yet again to the point of laboring intellectually over a matter which was in fact long ago decided.



And this is all very pressing to me, given my own particular road of spiritual development. On my path, compassion, tolerance, and gentleness have always seemed the most necessary bedrock, the attributes without which other virtues are either meaningless or impossible. Moreover, in order to attain those three, one must start with the very first stone, which is humility. One cannot understand the struggles of another, let alone wish to ease the other's suffering, if he cannot first comprehend - viscerally, completely, in the profoundest depths of his soul - the truth of 'there but for the grace of God go I.'

My view is simple: there is no species of human suffering that is the province only of one type of human. The paths that lead to suffering are as diverse as the people who choose them and who are thrust into them, but in the end, sadness, loneliness, and fear are experienced as the same thing by us all, at whatever age, in whatever country, with whatever level of education or wealth. Whatever someone else is feeling, the specifics of his or her situation notwithstanding, is something each of us has, will, or can feel ourselves.

It is easier to feel compassion and thus be giving when the stakes are low, when the issue is something like rude and aggressive driving, or getting overcharged by a mechanic, than when it involves actual hatred or violence -- but that is where the principle is proven. That is where a person either lives his truth or renounces the core of his beliefs. Responding calmly to mild stress is one thing; very, very, very few of us even consider running over pedestrians on a crosswalk because they are making us late for a business meeting. In situations of real violence or deliberate victimization, literally turning the other cheek is a significantly deeper commitment.

One of the things I take greatest comfort in within Catholic spirituality is the huge emphasis laid on individual discernment, on prudent use of one's own conscience to determine the correct path in novel circumstances. This is likewise one of the things I most respect about the Friends; both share a belief that with prayer and devout listening we have it within ourselves to hear God's will, an amazing God-given power of judgment. In Catholicism, obviously there is more dogma and doctrine than with the Friends, but if after the best use I can make of my conscience I find in that something I cannot fully accept, or one element, such as mercy, the necessity of which outshines all other imperatives, that is between God and me, so long as I don't portray my actions as being representative of all official Church teaching.

And that is a tremendous gift of spiritual liberty, borne of a deep respect for the many ways we in our wondrous diversity can inhabit God's Word. If this catholicity of gifts and spiritualities were not recognized, then in a manner of speaking either the Carthusians or the Franciscans would have to be 'wrong.' Either the noble soldier serving his country or the grandmother in the Peace and Justice Ministry would be a heretic, and somebody or other would have to chuck either the thinky Chesterton, the silent John Main, or the loving Jean Vanier off the proverbial Train to Glory. I'm glad we get to keep them all!

The lover's discourse stifles the other

who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance. -Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

An acquaintance, having read the profile I managed to endure having up on Match for two weeks, made interesting comment. Well, interesting to me, at any rate, as pretty much anything regarding me is a source of endless (self-) entertainment. Which is good, inasmuch as that at least makes one of us.

What he said was that, while on the surface my profile appears to be very intimidating in terms of what I would be seeking in a partner, it is in fact, or so he reckoned (correctly, as it turned out, but then he is smart and that is invaluable when it comes to reckoning, dead or otherwise) not at all. This is because, unlike in the overwhelming majority of cases, I offer no list of what he has to be. Or like, or be like. And there isn't one, isn't any such list, anywhere in my head.

Consequently, many of the things that came closest to being stipulations were mediated by friendly and sort-of relativist terms: he doesn't have to believe in God, for example, but would ideally 'believe in Good'; he should 'more or less accept some sort of ontological basis' with regard to my referencing the mundane, the sordid, and the divine as categories. So not hardcore at all; in fact, pretty nimbly leaving the door open for discussion on whatever, even the huge things -- provided he knows what the bloody heck I'm even talking about.

That, of course, remains a bit of a sticking point, and one which I've argued with myself over for years. Intellectually, of course, I would think it fatuous to hope someone, friend or lover or sister-in-law, has the same reading resume, for example, that I do. Certainly my reading has been as much a part of my life, or my development, as my varied experiences -- but I wouldn't expect or consciously hope that someone would have had the same Life History that I have, so why do so with books, or thinky pursuits?

But I do imagine there is a bottom level either of fluency or of competence with the ideas and values I might be expressing, or the way in which I intend a certain word, or come to a position, or approach an idea or situation. And I'm not sure, though, whether that relates to actual intellectual experience or innate intelligence (the 'fluency' versus the 'competence'). Moreover, there is certainly the part of me that wishes on the one hand never, ever to fall in love with someone I'm going to have to have arguments with over Homi Bhabha or Agamben! Really really really. That part of me that distrusts and at some level despises all language and particularly despises any language that talks about language. The part of me that can love, rather than 'love.'

So, wow, it would be fantastic to find someone who did believe that some things transcended language, defied articulation -- and who was passionate enough to be able to seek those sort of experiences openly, genuinely. Unpostmodernly!

But, anyway, yes I do not say, must like Telemark skiing and growing Siberian ginseng; must be at least this high and weigh no more this; must eat, or not eat, meat; must like Western Swing and Shostakovich. So mine, for all its bloated words and grandiloquent turbidity, makes, in a sense, far fewer demands on the potential suitor than all those who ask that you agree on income, occupation, children, pets, occupation, hobbies, politics, and 'turn-on' and 'turn-offs' before you make a move one way or the other. Of course, not that I worked this out or laboured over the diction, but I'm sure somewhere in my pointy head there was the notion and the desire that the content and the writing and the vocabulary would nauseate and repel the least suitable.

Still, it is not as though I don't have desires or limits. We all do. In my case though, I have this possibly wrong-headed but nonetheless inextinguishable belief, or at least sense, that what matters is ultimately evinced. This, I have discovered (and so have others, and I'm sorry, genuinely) is one more thing that makes me a ghastly date. I don't ask questions. I'm also pretty sure I give weird answers when people ask me normal ones. The latter relates to so much being contingent or context-driven for me. As a very trivial example, I really do hate pickles, at some level. Nonetheless, I have a jar of Zesty Dills, I believe they are, in the front of my refrigerator, and I have on occasion cut up two of them and eaten them for dinner. But if someone were, for his own idiosyncratic reasons, to wish to know on a first date where I stood on the matter of pickles, I would not know how to answer. I would probably say I hate them, because that is an answer, and because it came to my head, but it's not true in the way I can say I like taking long drives alone listening to weird reportings about Central Asia. Certainly if he asked something of greater substance I could well be far more nonplussed and nearly preverbal in my stumbling attempts to come up with something resembling an expectable answer...

Partly it is because, when it comes to the big things, especially anything having to do with a big-R Relationship, nothing is really true at that point, and you as my interlocutor have no context for understanding anything I might say about me, if it were the case that I could come up with something. As there is no relationship, it serves little for me to do what amounts to conjecture about what I might or might not be like in a relationship. Admittedly, too, as I look at it, I think some of that reticence derives from an inground and inescapable sense of the seemly, even when I can remember 'what I am like' or 'what I like.'

But it's also truly that what I like depends on who you are. If I don't need a 6'2"-6'4" linedancing Presbyterian wildlife-biologist father of no more than two, then what I will enjoy with you depends on who you come to this as, and what sort of connection we develop together. If you really want me to come crew with you at the stockcar races, and I love you, then manifestly I am going to come to love the stockcar races, and your car, and your hot new exhaust system, and your pit crew. I may well come to love the pickles the Snak-Shak passes out with their hot dogs!

Frankly, it's also just fair. I am no longer twenty, and have tastes and opinions and my own little life, and I would hope that no one would demand that I stop engaging in all the silly little things that give me pleasure. If I hold out the hope that you will accept that I have a weakness for bad Arab dance music at times, and that every other month my house has a completely different color scheme, then who am I to ask you to renounce fly fishing or your veneration of a comic I consider insipid and exhausting?

And so instead of asking I wait. So, too, I think that what it occurs to you to tell me is arguably more revelatory than those things you share merely because you were prodded, those things that were not in your head, even if they really are a part of your life. I am given more things - more information, more insight - in the former case than the latter, by a lot. There is an interesting why there that doesn't exist in the second case, in which the only 'why' is because I asked you to tell me. Which is very boring compared to reflecting on what it might mean that you described your employees but not your firm, or your favorite poets but not novelists, or how you felt in Denali but not in Dalian.

In other words, I can make you tell me about mean, mean Sr. Catherine making you stand in the hall yet again for passing notes in class, or whether you preferred to be the bank robber or the policeman -- but what do you want to say? I'm not going to get a full picture anyway, I am not going to get to your core at this point, so what is the self you wish to give me, here where we are now? Yes, it could all be lies, but it could also be untrue that you went to Catholic school!

Upon reflection, I have decided that this approach, the receptive rather than active or inquisitive one, makes normal people think I am cold, uninterested, and in all likelihood a supercilious she-devil. Commingled with my insurmountable inability to give the vaguest idea of how I am when I'm in love (which is, in all frankness, the opposite of how I am when I am with someone I don't know -- but who would know that??), it makes for a very unappealing proposition for my unsuspecting date. And in sense, a very, very strong sense, if you like (not that I think it's possible, but let's hypothesize, shall you?) how I am on the date (the distance, the ostensible apathy, the cool, the lack of anything resembling the guts of me in evidence anywhere), then you will not like the me that would emerge in a Relationship. If you, by contrast, find the Date me ineffably off-putting, then my bad luck indeed, as you might be just the sort the Relationship me would get on with brilliantly.





Too bad you and she will never meet.