19. COMPASSION

    Whenever ecclesiastical authorities justify the harsh judgments they seek to impose as dictates of an objective moral order, I want to protest:  "Have you no understanding of the compassion so evident in Jesus' dealings with wounded individuals?"

    To expose the will to power in such efforts to justify judgments, I have sometimes brought up the devastating critiques of traditional efforts to justify the ways of God to unbelievers that abound in the Philosophy of Religion.  Recently, I realized that all these efforts seek to accredit the conception of God derived from a metaphor of power and judgment.

    One such argument can be simply stated:  If there is not a God who rewards and punishes human actions in the next life, human beings would have no reason to be good.  After all, the wicked often prosper in this life, while bad things happen to good people.

    The argument seems plausible to individuals who have been socialized to believe that Adam's original sin left his offspring inescapably self-centered (or, at best, motivated by enlightened self-interest) and that God is just.  To me, however, it is simply another attempt to disguise the immorality of efforts to justify an objective morality.

    In my now abandoned work on moral discourse, I centered moral discourse in the longing for an ever-more fully human and uniquely personal existence.  I grant that many individuals are not aware of this longing.  But the moral discourse generated by a metaphor of intimacy identifies the wounding interactions with other individuals which have stifled or stunted this longing, often in ways that evoke resistance to genuinely personal initiatives taken by others.  And when individuals become capable and willing to address this woundedness, they begin to understand that, without intimate involvements with others, the quest for a more-fully human and uniquely personal existence is doomed to failure.

   In sum, this ethics of intimacy voices a call for vulnerable and respectful self-revelations when intimate involvements tap deeply buried and hopelessly tangled feelings,  Individuals are free to respond to or silence the call.  But the ethics also reveals that feelings we bury in order to control them exert a hidden control over our interactions with others.

    At this point, a difference between the ethical theories advanced by Socrates and Kant and the ethics of intimacy deserves mention.  Thus, Socrates believed that subjecting face-to-face dialogue concerning moral notions to the dialectical structure enshrined in the so-called Socratic method would confer a self-knowledge that, in turn, conferred self-mastery.  Centuries later, Kant argued that the use of reason to generate categorical imperatives would enable human beings to harness passion and desire to moral ends and become free in the process.  Both grounded moral discourse in a metaphor of individuality indebted to the interiorization of literary as an interrogatory stance rather than a metaphor of intimacy designed to enable individuals to voice their tangled depths vulnerably and respectfully.

    In my encounters with wounded individuals as a priest and as a person, therefore, I remind myself that a call for vulnerable and respectful interactions includes a call to be present without judgments and agendas.  If I were challenged to offer theological justification for this conviction, I would invoke my passionate belief that Jesus is fully human as well as fully God, that he is a wounded Healer who comes to us through one another, and that the God revealed through the incarnation of the eternal Word is a God of love, not a God of power and judgment.

    By extension, if the challenge were formulated as an issue in moral theology, I would insist that my commitment to be a priest forbids me to judge or punish anyone.  If the person I encounter is a sociopath, any such reaction be a waste of breath or energy.  And so it is with the moral people who let me into their lives, since they are judging and punishing themselves more harshly than I could ever do.

    In sum, when I succeed in being present without judgments or agendas, I find that the indwelling Spirit moves in my wounded depths in ways that enable me to be vulnerably honest about what I think and feel, real or imagined, since I often cannot tell the difference.  And I find that wounded individuals hear what I think and feel as an invitation to trust me with deeper and more vulnerable self-revelations, not a judgment which has no interest in healing the woundedness that, in Paul's terms, prevents them from doing the good that they long to do.  And I find that the Spirit's love evokes a sympathetic imagination which enables me to respond with genuine compassion, and I now trust that this willingness to share honestly in the grieving process can bring new life out of cross-situations.