Recently, I watched a classic movie, The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman. In the film a character expresses compassion for an older man passed out, we assume from drinking, on a park bench. She tells her companion that she imagines how the man was at one time a tiny baby. With parents who loved him. In this way she expresses compassion for a person others look upon with scorn. Later on in the film we discover that she is capable of participating in an truly evil act.
Sharon encourages us to think of categories that allow us to practice extending a circle of compassion until we can imagine it encompassing the world. My categories began with those who engage in acts of kindness towards others and extended out to those who act in ways that, in my opinion, harm others.
I know people whom I have never heard speak an ill word against another. Others who always seem to be there to help others. Thinking of them brings a smile and a lightness. Knowing that they act with loving kindness makes it easy for me to think kindly of them.
As my circle widens I think of others who at times act from kindness and at other times seem to act selfishly. And occasionally, with unkindness. An unkindness that seems to come from hurt or fear or anger. Because I find myself falling short I can still feel loving kindness towards these people because I see them, and myself, as flawed people who do care about others.
Finally, the circle reaches those whom I see as acting not with kindness but in ways that harm others. In ways that dehumanize others and cause them suffering. Here is where practicing loving kindness becomes hard – very hard.
Politics today, including here in Canada, seem to increasingly have become a place where we are urged not to debate with others but to hate and destroy them if they disagree with us. Can I find it in me to extend loving kindness towards a politician like Donald Trump who embodies that type of message? If I am honest I can not. Not yet. But I do think of those who find appeal in his message. Out of their fear, anger and suffering they seek answers. In seeking relief from suffering are they so different from me?
In The Conversation a character capable of compassion is also capable of cruelty. For loving kindness to work for me I have to cultivate the belief that all human beings carry in them the potential for compassion while recognizing their potential to be cruel. That our acts of selfishness and even cruelty come from the same places of suffering that each of us has within us. And that it is the cultivation of loving kindness that offers a path for the relief of suffering – ours and others.