A couple days a week I work at the house of a Chiropractic doctor that lives in a nice big house just outside of Molalla. He owns about seventy or so acres out there, mostly timber, a field, and a couple ponds. From around twelve-thirty to five, every Tuesday and Thursday, he’ll have me doing odd jobs: chopping wood, limbing trees, blowing leaves, or whatever he needs done; all of which I do diligently, if not usually without any hassle or major mistakes. I’m a “good worker” I guess, at least, he says as much about me often enough. In spite of this, the reality is I’m practically broke when I look at how much I will be spending soon and how much I can reasonably expect to earn in the same amount of time. But Mr. Robinson faithfully pays me twelve dollars an hour for what I do. He must know the work isn’t worth that much. He ought to know he could probably hire someone with more experience for almost half what he pays me. But he does it anyway.
Of course, you could read a lot of motives into his generosity: guilt perhaps, maybe an “investment in the future”, or a brazen lack of economic sense. And all of these would, at least indirectly, clarify a view of the particular sensibility I think he is conveying and imparting to me. Many pessimists might attempt to reduce this sensibility to an instinctual urge to relieve past wrongs or even a merely self-interested appeal to a better future. But neither of these views portray the whole mystery that is compassion. And this, I think, is what Mr. Robinson’s generosity is attempting to grasp. Compassion is to suffer with another, and true compassion is always focused on the particular; it is personal, and it is intimate.
One can hardly think about compassion at all without being reminded of a story. It may be a story of our own, when someone did something very nice for us. And it may also be a story about some great man or woman of compassion like, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, or the Good Samaritan. Nonetheless, because compassion is so personal it is best understood as a narrative. Compassion constrains us to make this story or that story our story. It is inclusive, and as such it is never humanly comprehensive. Compassion does not generalize, and it takes scale into account.
Today, we hear a lot about loving the world and saving the planet. There are many good reasons for thinking in these terms and taking it seriously. But you will never be asked to feel compassion for the planet. The very thought is staggering and foreign because it is outside of human scale. In a time when communities are crumbling and so many families are broken, how can we hope to “save the planet?” If I can’t bring myself to love my neighbor, what are my chances of loving the world in any meaningful sense? The scale of compassion is very specific and always works its way from the bottom up. Before I can have compassion for my fellow man I must cultivate compassion for my next-door neighbor. The one with the dog that always knocks over the garbage can and the one who often seems to have forgotten what is appropriate to wear in public on a Saturday morning.
Because compassion is personal and particular, it is not something that you must feel and neither is it something that is purely chanced upon. Compassion is choice and, as such, is cultivated and built upon. Compassion is an immediate unity. It is a willingness to relate to the present with all that you are. It’s instinct is for mutuality; to suffer with, and sometimes, to suffer for another. It seeks the familiar and seeks to make all that it can grasp familial. And to the degree that we unite ourselves with those others around us, it is an act of self-denial and service; extended not from duty but from intimate affection---chosen and gifted to us. Compassion is a sensibility cultivated from mutual experience---both empathy and memory. And yet, compassion intrinsically resists classification and even limits. It remains a mystery when out of context. It wishes to be known in the action and in the narrative. It cannot be understood rationally nor by experience alone. It refuses to be domesticated because it unabashedly yearns for domesticity.
Underneath the good-naturedness and simple humility of Mr. Robinson, I think, lies the same resolve. His generosity towards me is because of a particular desire to make me a part of and familiar to himself. He knows what I am up against from his own experience as a young man having to find a way to pay for college. And he is not willing to see it as merely my problem, but rather as our problem; not because he cares about humanity but because he cares about me.