I know a young couple, newly married, hardly settled in, who, after seeing a story on television, about the situation of orphans in Sierra Leone—the poorest country in the world—got up the next day and started making phone calls to embassies and Congress persons, till they made the connection that put them on a plane to Africa to establish the residency requirements that would legitimize their application for adoption there.

It’s a wonderful story and there are thousands more like it. And yet at the same time we also read about the abuse of children and the beating of the innocent and the fleecing of the ignorant and of armies that rape and pillage and practice genocide.

The very thought of it all is mind-boggling. The very thought of all those things leaves the soul breathless. How do we account for so much inhumane treatment by one human being of another?

Or, just as seriously, how do we account for such reckless compassion in the midst of so much cloying evil? The question is not new. It’s a classic one, in fact. Scholars have been debating it for years.

Bernard Mandeville, for instance, English moral philosopher of the 17th century, first posed the question that has shaped the nature of that problem for over 400 years, until our own time! The question as Mandeville posed it is a clear one: If you see a child about to be dropped into a fire pit, Mandeville asked, and you lunge to catch it, are you saving that baby because you are really convinced that the life of another must be saved? Or because of what we now call  “aversion arousal,” because the very thought of burning flesh makes you sick.

Some say compassion is a given. Others say compassion is a scam. So who’s right, and why? Is there a basic goodness in us or do Jesus, and the Talmud, the Brahma, the Buddha and the Prophet all present the world with an ideal beyond the possible?

Answers to the question abound: whole institutions now exist devoted entirely to this issue. Do we “do unto others” because it makes us feel good about ourselves? Or do we do good for others more out of a concern maybe for our public image than for the quality of our personal morality?

Each of those explanations have been long held—and often seem true. But they do not account for the massive outflow of human concern that keeps our private little worlds spinning toward rightness day after day after day.

We need better answers than those and those answers come from two places. The first answer, the unlikely one, comes out of science and neurobiology. In laboratories around the globe now, with technologies unknown until our own age, neurologists are conducting one test after another of MRIs, brain scans, electrographic prints, neurotransmitters, genetic codes and evolutionary paleontology, that measure, in other words, human emotional responses and reactions to other people’s pain.

Evolutionary scientists tell us that later-day evolution of the limbic brain with its capacity for feeling, for emotions, for bonding, marks the human as more human the less self-centered we are. The brain, in other words, is hard-wired for compassion.

Compassion is not a social facade. Compassion is not a sham designed to mask our essential self-centeredness. Compassion is the emotion that links us to those outside ourselves. It is the capacity for outreach. It enables us, it drives us, to go beyond ourselves to the beating pulse of the rest of the world. Compassion, then, is a veritable dimension of what it means to be fully human.

The other proof, the second proof, the overwhelmingly improbable proof of the universalism of compassion is religion. Religions, with all their diversities of creeds and canons, rituals and liturgies, all their conflicting truth claims, all their standard-brand assertions of superiority, all of their traditional differences, have two things in common.

At the base of every religion—however distinct, however unique, they claim themselves to be—stands two common pillars:

One, the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. And the other, the undisputed and indispensable moral compass of them all, compassion, the unwavering ability to feel pain that is not our own.

In Hinduism, compassion is one of the three central virtues.

In Buddhism and its commitment to end suffering, compassion is the very core, the warm center of the tradition.

In Judaism, the Talmud teaches, “that which is hateful unto you, do not impose on others.”

In Christianity, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,” is a constant theme.

In Islam, 113 of the 144 chapter of the Koran open in the name of God, “the most merciful...the most compassionate.”

It is compassion, then, that is the divinely dangerous glue of the human race. So what can you and I do to make compassion possible in a world reeling from the relegation of it to prayer books and pretty pictures?

First, we must learn to be silent long enough to listen, to hear the cry of the other, to attend to someone else’s needs. Listening is at the center, the very core of compassion. But listening is not enough.

Second, we must be willing to remember the sharp edge of sufferings past. Our own. The way we process our own pain determines how we will deal with everyone else’s pain, as well. To ignore pain or to deny it or suppress it does not prepare us to respond well to what we hear from others. On the contrary, this is exactly what leads us to tell other people to get over it, to ignore it, to offer it up. It is exactly those attitudes that perpetuate injustice, that make the pain of the world invisible to the world.

The third dimension of compassion is experience. To get that, we have to step outside our comfort zone. We have to find our way into the lives of those who suffer until their sufferings scrape away our indifference to it.

And fourth, we must cull our own spiritual ideals for our attitudes toward pain, our hopes for human community, our ideas about the will of God for all humankind and our commitment to translate compassion into action.

Finally, we know now that compassion to be learned must be seen in action. Which means that you and I must model it so the next generation—a generation raised on drugged up celebrities and professional profiteers—will have alternatives to choose from. In order to change the world, then, to be a real sign of change we need to join with others, we need to commit ourselves to groups, whose very purpose is compassion.

It is up to people like us, then, to remember the compassion that saved us somewhere along the way and then to stand up and pass that goodness on. “One can never pay in gratitude,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote. “One can only pay in kind somewhere else in life.”

We don’t give things to people because they need them or deserve them. We give things to people because someone, somewhere gave to us–and now it’s our turn.

The foundation of compassion, then, rests on the scientific awareness that as human beings we need one another to come to the fullness of our own humanity. Religions teach us that we need to be catalysts for kindness, we need to be a reservoir of understanding for the world. We need to be signs of the compassionate one—the Brahman, the Buddha, the Messiah, the Christ, the Prophet—whom, we tell ourselves, we follow.

And we need to be it now while there is still a world for compassion to cultivate.

Conversation with Joan Chittister

Lillian Daniel: Joan, it’s wonderful to have you back. You always give me so much to think about.  I’m going to that most practical example where many people wonder, “Should I go with compassion or compassion fatigue?” You’re walking down the street and person after person asks you for money. There are some folks who will stop and give to every person who asks. Others will say, “You know, I’m not going to give to those people but I’m going to give to organizations that works to end homelessness.” Some of us find ourselves in the middle. One day we’re giving money wondering: Is it going to go for drugs or is it going to help the person with food? Where’s the compassionate response in that messy area?

Joan Chittister: Well, in the first place, don’t make false alternatives. Where you are that day is what counts. And if the money in your pocket is, as yourself, not available for that or you doubt or you’re not sure, then you give that money to the organization that is taking care of street people on Chicago streets. They have choices to make, too. So we’re not demeaning somebody by allowing them this spiritual adulthood of their own choices, in their own search. Having said that, the greater problem is when I say, “Well, somebody else does that. I don’t do that.” And so I pass by and I give nothing at all and I don’t find the group that is doing it either. We allow ourselves off the hook. I’m saying today, you get in it. You get in it, yourself. You find your way into that light and therefore empty your own life a bit, one way or another.

Lydia Talbot: Joan, you’re very busy everyday practicing the kind of compassion you’ve described to us. But I want to ask you a personal question. When you reflect on your own life and your own calling as a Benedictine nun, what are those times when you have received the kind of compassion you talk about, that intentional solidarity, that intentional listening, that intentional action as a result?

Chittister: Believe it or not, if you’re living in a genuinely good religious community as I am, it’s the breath we breathe. I went through polio in a community that carried me for years and still carries the marks of that. Nobody has told me that for some reason or other I’m too great a burden to carry. It’s at the point where you know that who you are and who that sister next to you is, together all of us might make one healthy person! Most of all, we are a reminder to one another of what we all need. The nature of community is such that when I fall, someone else picks me up.

There’s a great old monastic story where a lay person says to the monastic, “What do you do in the monastery?” And the old monastic looks back and says, “Oh, we fall and get up. And we fall and get up. And we fall and we get up.”

Talbot: How do you apply that kind of compassion to somebody who has hurt you deeply?

Chittister: Well, in the first place you have to be concerned, as I said in the end, that someone else maybe can take care of that person better than you can at that point. Your reply is what a good doctor’s is: do no harm. You do not return in kind the toxicity of that situation. If you have to withdraw from it, then you withdraw. The important thing is that you do not become, in any situation, what you hate.

Daniel: I think we can imagine and expect somebody who lives in a loving environment, who’s surrounded by compassion, to return compassion in the world. What I’m amazed by is the people who might grow up in a home where they experienced very little love and very little compassion, and yet as adults they find their way to be truly compassionate people. Is that where the God piece comes into this?

Chittister: I don’t think there’s any doubt. I think it’s where the growth piece comes in. If indeed this science is correct, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, then it is of our humanity. And if I am going to grow, this is a piece of me that must grow. The people watching this program right now can say themselves, “Oh yeah, compassion. I know, nice stuff. A good marshmallow and cherry.” No. It is of the essence of your humanity.

Daniel: It’s who we are.

Talbot: Your humanity. And now, Joan, more than ever before, we need those sensitizing voices like yours that convey what it means to be human in a world bent on self-interest and greed. How do you read the barometer of compassion in a mean spirited world?

Chittister: Well, in the first place, in the United States where we are indeed struggling between violence and, I would argue, basic spirituality, there is, it would seem, an imbalance. At the same time, I know no people who are more inclined to support, in the midst of their own needs, those who have even less. You see it. If you were with me in our soup kitchen you’d know this recession has brought about as much compassion as it has pain.

Daniel: And we see it in you, Sister Joan.