A Life Afloat Builds Compassion

On our boat, we have found that by living simply and striving to simplify our lives, we become changed people. In seminaries, professors of worship mention that liturgy shapes people. How worship is done impacts those worshiping. So, too, do the ways we live our lives.

One of the ways that living afloat as changed us, is that it has brought us more in harmony with the natural world around us. At the same time, we are encouraged to continue striving to be more in harmony with the world around us. Not only the natural world, filled with creatures great and microscopic, but also the world of people and institutions. We find ourselves trying to be more justice oriented in our life style.

When I read the following quote on our summer cruise, I was struck by how we (and you?) are striving for a fuller holistic lifestyle, a life style of compassion.

Blessed Be,

Joel

From the Introduction:

     In acquiescing in compassion's exile, are are surrendering the fullness of nature and of human nature, for we, like all creatures in the cosmos, are compassionate creatures. All persons are compassionate at least potentially. What we all share today is that we are victims of compassion's exile. The difference between persons and groups of persons is not that some are victims and some are not: we are all victims and all dying from lack of compassion; we are all surrendering our humanity together. The difference is in how persons react to this fact of compassion's exile and our victimization. Some persons react by joining the forces that continue the exile of compassion and joining them with a single mindedness and tenacity that guarantees still more violence, still more of compassion's exile; other react by despair and cynicism - drink, eat and be happy for tomorrow we exterminate ourselves; still others react with what Ned O'Gorman calls the "abstract calm" of intellectuals and other too-busy people who want it both ways and advocate political change while living high on the hog. Others are reacting by fleeing to fundamentalist religions and spiritualisms. Spiritualist and fundamentalist spiritualities that forsake the tradition of imago dei and humanity's deification in favor of the preaching of sin and redemption will have virtually nothing to say about compassion, for compassion is a divine attribute (see chapter one) and a creative energy force and will not be learned by a cheap religious masochism.
     This book is an introduction to an analysis of compassion. It is meant to support those many persons who are moving to a fuller and fuller holistic life style - and there are many. It is also meant as an invitation to those still involved in the ladder-climbing dynamic of so much of our society to consider another way, a better way, called compassion. A more fun-filled and more justice-oriented way. A way of getting in tune with the universe at a time when, intellectually and at the level of scientific discovery, we are confirming the fact that mystics have preached for centuries - namely, that the universe is a very finely tuned organism indeed. And yet, at the level of life-styles and social structures, we are hardly in tune with the universe at all.
Matthew Fox. A Spirituality Named Compassion and the Healing of the Global Village, Humpty Dumpty and Us. Winston Press, 1979. ii-iii.