Giving, Receiving, as Love Shows Us How ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 12, 2025

It was almost exactly 10 years ago now, in November of 2015, to be exact, that presidential candidate Donald Trump openly mocked a reporter with a physical disability. Perhaps you remember the video footage, of the candidate giving an exaggerated imitation of the reporter, a man named Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint disorder. I remember watching the video in horror, at the gleeful mockery, the utter lack of compassion. And I have wondered ever since, why that episode, caught on video, wasn’t the end of a presidential campaign. When candidate Trump weathered that scandal and surged on, it felt like a sudden change in our culture, a shift away from even a pretense of kindness or compassion.

Since that day we have watched as that shift has gathered momentum, not just here, but in other parts of the world. Today, we see many people being treated as scapegoats, particularly trans and non-binary people, and immigrants. Overseas we have watched over the past two years as the brutality of Hamas in murdering Israeli citizens and capturing hostages was met with all-out war on the people of Gaza, who have been given no opportunity to escape the killing and resulting famine.

And no matter where these inhumane episodes have taken place, there are always loud angry voices in support, seemingly hungry for even more. As I mentioned last week, the value of empathy has become suspect in some parts of society, regarded as weak or manipulative. We badly need an in-breaking of compassion, of kindness; a return to the ability to look at one another with soft eyes.

There have been plenty of hard times in these past 10 years, particularly the pandemic. I suspect that over this time, many people have started to feel less safe, perhaps less secure economically. Loud voices reinforce that, reminding people that others are dangerous, that others are taking resources away from them.

In recent days, as I have pondered this, I have found myself thinking about gated communities. Picture owning a lovely house, with a manicured yard, a highly-controlled environment, that is walled off from the surrounding city. This is appealing to a large number of people; they can feel safe and secure, and that nothing unpleasant or dangerous will be able to reach them.

But what happens once you are comfortably ensconced in your new risk-free home? Do you feel safe leaving it? Do you feel safe at the grocery store, or going into the city for a cultural event? Over time, might you withdraw more and more, as your fear of the outside world grows?

The gated community, of course, is a metaphor for what is happening in the minds and hearts of many of our citizens today. And as they retreat, whether literally or metaphorically, their hearts harden out of fear. Hearts harden, and walls grow taller.

How do we manage to resist this ever-louder drum beat of fear, and grow in compassion?

The author and spiritual teacher Mark Nepo offers this Hindu wisdom tale in his Book of Awakening:

A master was tired of hearing his student complain about his life. He gave him a glass of water and told him to stir a handful of salt into the glass, and then take a drink. The master asked the student, “How did that taste?” The student, spitting it out, replied, “Bitter!” Now the master told the student to take a handful of salt and throw it into the lake. After the student threw the salt, the master told him to drink from the lake. Then the master asked, “Do you taste the salt?” The student answered that he did not. The master told him:

“The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things …. stop being a glass. Become a lake.” (The Book of Awakening, pp. 17-18)

Of course, this is the same message that the Dalai Lama offered in his conversation with Archbishop Desmond Tutu – that if we look toward the suffering of others instead of away, it lessens our own suffering. As we grow in compassion, we learn to ‘become the lake’, instead of just being like a small glass of bitter salty water. In broadening our vision and extending our compassion, we learn that this is not about comparison; how our burdens compare with the burdens of others. This is about the enlarged understanding that we share suffering and burdens, and are all more alike than we are different. Then our own pain becomes less, the salt diluted by the vast amount of water we find ourselves sharing.

When we are able to realize this, to feel this, we can sense the gift that compassion offers. Perhaps it feels selfless to act with compassion, but in fact, we stand to gain more than we give. Maria Popova, author and cultural commentator, offers this wisdom:

“There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness.” (Maria Popova, in The Marginalian, https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/07/26/ellen-bass-kiss/)

Compassion, then, extended to others, comes back to us, much as the lion was saved by the little mouse he allowed to escape. Life behind walls, the walls of the gated communities of our cities and the walls we build in our hearts, forbids encountering others. Life behind walls allows no reciprocity, no movement and growth toward each other. The life behind walls prevents us from recognizing all we share, all that we have in common.

I have long said that the greatest enemy of love isn’t hatred, but rather, fear. Fear builds the walls that keep us apart. Fear keeps us from taking the risk of offering compassion to others; it keeps us from recognizing the humanity of others, such as the disabled reporter that a presidential candidate made such fun of ten years ago.

Our work in this time, as progressive religious people, is to resist this erosion of kindness and compassion. Our work is to think of compassion as a spiritual practice, one that we can strengthen, much as we strengthen our muscles when we work out at the gym or do our physical therapy exercises.

The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, in her book The Places that Scare You, offers a practice to help us to grow in compassion, to soften our gaze and our hearts, to be able to open ourselves to the suffering of others. Her practice is very similar to the metta meditation I have shared with you over the years, the loving kindness meditation. Like metta, compassion practice begins with ourselves. How often do you consciously offer compassion to yourselves? But if you do not, are you truly able to offer it to others? So we begin by wishing for ourselves: “May I be free of suffering.” You can use your own words. Perhaps: “May I be free of pain, and that which causes me pain.” Or: “may I be safe and free from fear.”

Then, we expand our view to someone we care about. “May my partner be free from pain and fear.”

Next, expand your view even wider, to a friend or neighbor. We can also offer a specific wish: “May my neighbor be relieved of her pain.” “May my friend find a way out of her financial problems.”

Now, it gets harder. This is why we call this a practice – it might take awhile of focusing on those we care about before we can turn our compassionate thoughts to a stranger. Can you look at someone passing you on the street and think, “May he be free of pain and suffering?” it could be some time before we would even remember to try this. But, Pema Chodron tells us, if we try this, suddenly the unknown person comes into focus for us. We will see them. And the gift to ourselves is that our own isolation diminishes.

Seeing one another, recognizing one another, is exactly what we often try to avoid: so often we try to protect ourselves from pain by not noticing, not making eye contact. But spiritual masters, including the Dalai Lama, try to tell us that the opposite is true: it is in our willingness to share the sorrow or suffering of others that our own pain is lessened. Become the lake, they tell us.

The compassion practice that Pema Chodron introduces becomes even harder. When we are ready, she asks us to generate compassion for a difficult person in our lives; someone who might actively cause us anger or pain. Chodron tells us, “This is a good time to remember that when we harden our heart against anyone, we hurt ourselves.” (The Places That Scare Us, p. 51)

This stage takes courage. We are asked to visualize the difficult person and say, “May this person who upsets me be free of suffering.” But Chodron tells us that this is how we begin to dissolve our fear, like the salt dissolving in the lake.

What the masters are telling us is that compassion is not a passive practice. We aren’t supposed to wait until a compassionate sensation arises in our bodies on its own. Last week I told you that I was defining compassion as “empathy in action.” We can think of action as active helping, of course – volunteering, helping a neighbor. But action also means to actively choose compassion, to actively practice it, to build our muscles and grow until we can face the world outside of ourselves with less fear.

These times we are enduring are calling to us – asking us to resist in many ways. May we respond by learning to actively practice compassion: to begin to bring those around us into focus, to not look away, to knock down the walls that other voices are urging us to build.

This too is resistance. May we resist with love, and courage, and compassion.

Amen.