Today is the second Holly Day, on which we consider Compassion. I’ve been listening to Paul Bloom talking about empathy, and the seductive danger of emotional reactivity, which makes us care more about a baby in well than climate change. Compassion is not that sort of follow-your-heart trap. It is the idea of caring for and about others. Compassion is not whose pain do I most feel, but who most needs my help. It is abstract, perhaps even a little cold blooded as Bloom describes it, but it is the foundation of our communal life.
I will likely be bringing every one of the Holly Days principals back to this strange morning in America. And for those of us who can barely imagine how we came to this bizarre political moment, who can no longer feel the brotherhood from sea to shining sea that moved us to join hands and sing This Land is Your Land, or Kumbayah, and for those who are celebrating today that they have finally gotten their country back, tho they probably never sang those songs, or maybe even felt we were ever their brothers, still we may all be feeling less compassion for each other than at anytime since the Civil War.
And that is one of the worst possible paths we may find ourselves on, with brother once again fighting brother, with the nation violently shattered. Other horrible paths, world wars, genocides or newly minted horrors we can barely imagine may be waiting for us in our disrupted state. But we can also certainly rise above those dark passages, and find some path that gets us back to that better place I am confident we will eventually come to, hopefully sooner than later and more gently than violently.
And what is most likely to get us to that bright new morning, most likely to quench the horror we have seen before and may inflict on one another again, is to care about the other, to have compassion for them and their lives and their families. The horror always needs a suspension of compassion, always needs to squelch our caring, lets not open the door to those darknesses.
HOLLY DAYS 