There has been a strong concern on my mind for many years that we Christians need to develop a spirituality of compassion; a spiritual approach that embraces the goodness of all creation and that seeks to promoted the inherent dignity of every human being. Simply put, we need a spirituality of deep compassion.
Contrary to the expectation of many religious people (of all the different religions of the world) our spirituality is never something that has been worked out in a set form that will last forever. Spirituality is not like a stone building (i.e, the pyramids in Egypt) that have stood solid for over four thousand years. Rather spirituality is a program (like the therapy after you have hip surgery) that enables to thrive and live well.
Spirituality is our listening to God in our lives (global and personal), being embraced by the Word of God, growing in prayer and spiritual practices and lived out in concrete details in our daily lives. Spirituality is found as much in our actions as in our prayers and teachings.
Two streams of spirituality are coming together in our Christian experience. There is much room to cooperate with other world religions (which is a first possibility in the history of world religions).
The first is the strong theology we have developed to promote and protect the dignity of all human beings. There is a strong call for our societies to respond to all humans with a consistent ethic of life. The full dignity of every human being must be supported, protected and nourished from conception until natural death.
Paralleling this concern for human life is the concern to preserve the earth. We must protect all forms of life (from the bacteria, to all birds and fish and to human beings). Global warming is a reality and we humans can change this threatening collapse of the ecosystems.
Pope Francis has clearly outlined in the encyclical, “Laudato si,” that both streams must be brought together. How humans treat the earth (extracting its minerals and cutting down its forests) is also how we treat human beings (the neglect of the millions of poor people on this globe). The correct attitude is to be concerned with both streams.
Christianity has the power within its soil (its origins) to develop a spirituality of compassion towards our future survival. Human beings cannot continue to abuse the earth and neglect its peoples. To continue to do what we are doing can only lead to collapse.
As we try to move into a new culture, a different approach to the earth, we need to be rooted in a strong religious (i.e., spiritual) tradition. Religion gives people the power to continue to work towards the good for decades and centuries, even if they experience little success or change. A spirituality of compassion that is rooted in God will sustain us through some of the very rough decades ahead.
Christianity has always has had to develop a meaningful spirituality for its own time and place. Consider what happened after the Black Death in 1347, after the abolition of slavery in the British and American Empires in the early and mid-1800’s and after the first and second world wars. Our Christian spirituality has to recreate itself after these disasters.
Pope Francis may be ahead of us (i.e., humanity) but he has laid out the correct path our spirituality (Christian and non-Christian alike) must take into the coming centuries. We must work towards a spirituality with wide open arms embracing the well-being of all human beings and supporting and protecting all of the earth.
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