Compassion Fatigue

When I was 8 years old, I slept on top of the covers, wrong way around on the bed. I had learned at an early age that the world was full of children (and, indeed, adults) who went to bed hungry, or who slept on dirt floors in refugee camps, and I was consumed with guilt that I, who had done nothing to deserve it, got a whole bed to myself and all the dinner I could eat. My guilt didn't prevent me from saying at dinner, as every child does, "Then send this broccoli to China!" But it did make it hard for me to get comfortable under my cozy covers at night. So I slept backwards on the bed, in solidarity with the little refugees on the other side of the world... or maybe in apology to them that I could not share my excessive comfort with their excessive need.

Ever since, I go through episodes where sayings like "None of us are home until all of us are home" are more crippling than challenging. My problem is not that I don't care; it's that sometimes I can't figure out how to care without ending up backwards on the bed again.

And that's why I couldn't finish Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, by Karen Armstrong, even though I had really been looking forward to it. (The link will walk you through all the steps, if you're curious.) Armstrong has made her name as a what she calls a "freelance monotheist," but to my mind, this book is most directly informed by Buddhist thought, which I find legalistic and therefore depressing. This style of teaching-- introspective, absolutist, insisting on "always, tirelessly, without exception" behaviors and "urgent, determined, consistent" maintenance of certain inward attitudes, all under our own steam, with no help from an empowering God-- seems to me like Bel and Nebo:

"The things that you carry are burdensome,
A load for the weary beast.
They stooped over, they have bowed down together;
They could not rescue the burden,
But have themselves gone into captivity." (Isaiah 46, New American Standard Bible)

This is the kind of thinking that got me in trouble when I was 8 years old, and I just can't go back. I became a Christian precisely because I couldn't bear the burden of constant monitoring of my own thoughts and attitudes, because I knew I needed help every single minute just to be a tolerable human being, because I knew that I had to receive as well as give, and that the well from which I drew had to be deeper than myself or any other created thing. Just as God says:

"You who have been borne by Me from birth
And have been carried from the womb;
Even to your old age I will be the same,
And even to your graying years I will bear you!
I have done it, and I will carry you;
And I will bear you, and I will deliver you." (Isaiah 46, continued)

For me, the first step in how to be good is to give up on the whole project and agree with Jesus that "No one is good except God alone" (Mark 10:18). Eugene Peterson wrote a book called The Pastor: a Memoir about two models of church development, and they could well be two models of any kind of ministry. There is the Ptolomaic model, the one where the sun, the moon, and everything else we can see goes around us. Makes sense, matches our observations. But then there's the Copernican model, where almost everything does not go around us, but around the sun. That model has the great drawback of being something you can't see but just have to believe. But it is true. The earth, even my own small sphere of influence, does not revolve around me but around Someone who is truly tireless and consistent.  The starving and the refugees are not, thank God, dependent on my good intentions. They won't be fed and housed by my gesture of solidarity. Providing beds and bread for all of them was God's concern long before it was mine, and will continue to be His project long after I am gone-- or even if I just burn out and quit.