Day: September 23, 2012

“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.

We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. How can it be made to live in us again? That is the purpose of this Gospel story.

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“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

We have seen this picture far too many times. It is the picture of the weeping widow and the grieving mother. Almost every day and for far, far too many years, we have had to contemplate the spectacles of unbearable griefs and unspeakable sorrows: mothers and wives weeping for the loss of their children and husbands obliterated and destroyed in acts of calculated yet mindless violence in the troubled war zones of our world and day, in Kabul, in Aleppo, in Benghazi, to name but a few. Such pictures have become the commonplaces of our culture and, paradoxically, the commentary upon our capacity for compassion.

We have, I fear, become too accustomed to such sights. Grief has become politicized; our emotions have become the battleground for competing political causes. The real casualty is compassion. Compassion has been killed in us. In its place, there reigns frustration and rage, cynicism and despair at our own impotence. We look upon what we cannot control or perhaps even begin to comprehend. We look and then we look away. We want to run away. Any vestiges of compassion that we might once have felt are swallowed up in bitterness and anger.

And yet, perhaps, just perhaps, another glance at this gospel story might help us to look again and to look again with eyes of compassion, not just cynical disdain, to look with hearts of patient hopefulness, not just crippling despair. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is something here that speaks to the unspeakable griefs of our world and day. In our cynicism and despair, we are like the young man who is dead and who is being carried to his grave. But in the looking again at this poignant picture of a widow’s grief and a mother’s sorrow, perhaps, just perhaps, we shall be raised up in the hope that arises from the compassion of Christ.

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