Compassion

Prophet Ibrahim
The father of the Prophets

The birth of a Great Prophet

Ibrahim was born in a house of idolaters, in the kingdom of Babylon. His father Aazar was a well known idol sculptor that his people worshipped. As a young child, Ibrahim used to watch his father sculpting these idols from stones or wood. When his father was done with them, Ibrahim would use them as toys, riding on their backs, and kicking them at times. Then after a while, he would see these same statues in the temple, and people prostrating in front of them! Ibrahim asked his father: "Why do you take these toys to the temple?" His father said: "They are statues that represent our gods. We worship them, we ask favors from them, and we offer them presents." Ibrahim's mind rejected this idea, and he felt a repulsion towards the idols.

In search for the Truth

 God is Greater than what his people were worshipping, Most Powerful, Most Magnificent. One could not find Him sitting on a table in a temple!

One night, Ibrahim went up to the mountain, leaned against a rock, and looked up to the sky. He saw a shining star, and told his people: "Could this be my Lord?" But when it set he said: "I don't like those that set." The star has disappeared, it could not be God. God is always present. Then he saw the moon rising in splendor and told them: "Could this be my Lord?" But it also set. At daybreak, he saw the sun rising and said: t "Could this be my Lord, this is bigger?" But when the sun set he said: "O my people I am free from all that you join as partners with Allah! I have turned my face towards Him Who created the heavens and the earth, and never shall I give partners to Allah." Our Lord is the Creator of the heavens and the earth and everything. He has the power to make the stars rise and set. Ibrahim then heard Allah calling him: "O Ibrahim!" Ibrahim said trembling: "Here I am O my Lord!" "Submit to Me! Be a Muslim!" Ibrahim fell on the ground, prostrating and crying, he said: "I submit to the Lord of the universe!" Ibrahim kept prostrating until night came again. He got up and went back to his home, in t peace, full of conviction that Allah has guided him to the Truth.

In the summer of 1964, I sat on the dark blue fabric of the couch in our living room with its knotty pine paneling in Millington, Tennessee watching the Democratic convention and conducting my own personal Republican celebration of what I imagined to be the impending demise of a party in disarray, with a repulsive and criminal leader named Lyndon Johnson, sure to lead his party to defeat by the intrepid and noble Goldwater.

But as I watched our little black-and-white television, right next to where our black maid Mary Smith came every week to set up her ironing board and do the mopping and sweeping and cleaning for our poor white minister’s family, I saw an amazing sight. There in Atlantic City, New Jersey, amidst several thousand white men representing Democratic Party caucuses and precincts from across the country and fifty different states, a lone black woman testified before the Credentials Committee and stared down those white men until they hushed up and turned toward her and quieted down so they and several million more Americans could hear what she had the nerve to say when her speech was broadcast in its entirety on all three networks that night.

The woman’s name was Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, and that day in New Jersey she told of being beaten, insulted and evicted. She said, “All of this is on account of us wanting to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Half a decade later, in the summer of 1969, Fannie Lou was fifty-one years old, and she came to visit Madison on a sweltering day that in its heat and heaviness reminded me of my old home town in Tennessee, 140 miles due north from Fannie Lou’s home in Ruleville, Mississippi, a day when the trees and the people wilted in an unrelenting downpour of sunshine and the grass on the library lawn sat brown and lifeless and the surface of Lake Mendota lay mirrorlike and undisturbed by any errant breeze from the surrounding farmlands where cows and corn and soybeans lazed in shimmering fields.

I put up scores of leaflets and posters on bulletin boards all around campus, focusing in on the humanities classroom buildings and the student union and various leftwing delis and beer halls, bratwurst parlors and underground poetry venues where I might be able to snare students of history, English, political science, and creative writing, while avoiding the engineering hall and the business school, considering them a lost cause from the point of view of recruitment as it was well known that most engineers lacked a certain gene required for a highly developed consciousness of social justice. A bare handful of students and teachers showed up to hear her in a small room in the Student Union that had perhaps fifty stackable chairs, ten of which were occupied by summer school students along with a few townsfolk. Fannie Lou arrived a few minutes before her talk was to begin, which made me a little nervous because as a member of the organizing committee I was assigned to introduce her.

Fannie Lou was a heavyset woman in a flower print polyester dress, with her thick black hair pulled back behind her head in a scarf. She was 51 years old at the time, which meant she was more than twice as old as I was and possessed a great deal more gravity than I had.  She had a serious expression on her face and leaned forward to take my hand as we were introduced.  She looked right at me with her black eyes, and held my hand for a moment, squeezing it between hers, and she said, “Yes, Mr. Himes, I’m proud to know you.” Remembering Mary, our household maid in Tennessee, one of the few black adults I had met previously, I felt an obscure sense of shame that emanated from somewhere behind my ears.  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, lapsing back into a Tennessee drawl that I had spent the previous few years trying to leave behind me.  “I’m honored to meet you.”

I had read up a bit on Fannie Lou. I introduced her as a woman who had grown up as a sharecropper, illiterate and unskilled, with no way to earn a living other than by endless hours of picking cotton. She was famous as a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, I said. She was first introduced to the civil rights movement in 1962 when organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called a voter registration meeting. 

“That’s right,” said Fannie Lou when she stood up to speak.  “That’s when I was surprised to learn for the first time that black people had a constitutional right to vote. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. When those organizers asked for volunteers to go down to the courthouse and register to vote, I was the first person with my hand up.” She told how her landlord immediately evicted her from her home and her husband refused to take the same stand she took. She then devoted herself to changing the conditions of life for black people in Mississippi and across the South.

Fannie Lou talked about being arrested in 1962 by a Mississippi state highway patrolman, and dragged into a jail cell. “That man pulled down the back of my dress and he had two Negro prisoners beat me with a blackjack until I was black and blue and I was screaming. He said, ‘Fannie Lou, you better get the hell out of Mississippi, because we don’t cotton to upstart niggers that don’t know their place and get big ideas.’ And I said, ‘I will leave Sunflower County, Mississippi when God tells me to and not before.’”

Fannie Lou looked at me and looked at the few others in the room with me. She said, “You know, every single morning of every single day, I wake up in the morning and I look at the ceiling and I repeat these words, ‘I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ And I will tell you that I will spend every second of every minute of every day of my life to bring justice to Mississippi. I will have my freedom, or I will have my grave.”

In Fannie Lou Hamer’s words I heard a nobility and selflessness I had been looking for, and a cause much greater than myself. I resolved I would find a way to go back down South and join in the struggle that Fannie Lou had articulated. I wanted to devote my life to something as big and important as the dream she had been drawn to.

I tried an experiment yesterday, and successfully turned a large, loud, angry, abusive man into a bunnyrabbit.

The back story is that I am the owner of an old wooden boat, the upkeep of which probably takes more of my time and money than any sensible person should spend on an inanimate object. My boat has called the same slip at the same dock on Lake Union in Seattle home for a decade now. Every once in awhile, I connect my water hose to the spigot next to my boat and use it to fill my water tank or wash down the boat's exterior.

Recently, the two boats that share my water spigot have been occupied by boats whose owners live aboard the boats, and both owners have connected their own hoses to the two taps on the water spigot. Moreover, both of the other owners have asked me not to remove their hoses. This creates something of a problem for me, because I can only connect my hose by temporarily disconnecting someone else's hose. So yesterday, when I needed to fill my water tank, I knocked at the houseboat next door to let them know I would be using the water spigot, in order to avoid any problems for them. A woman came to the door, and I let her know that I would be using the water. Shortly, a large and angry man came out of the houseboat and began hollering at me. He ordered me to stop using "his" spigot, and let me understand that I would be in big trouble if I didn't follow his orders. I tried to explain that I had to get water from somewhere, and that I had been using this spigot for ten years with no problems. But he just hollered at me some more, went back into his houseboat and slammed the door.

I was confronted with a dilemma. I needed water, but I didn't want a war. He wasn't willing to listen to me or negotiate, so I had no partner in a solution. I considered writing a formal letter to the marina owner asking the marina to create a solution that would work for all of us, but the marina owner has a long history of being unresponsive to problems. Somehow, we, the people with the problem, needed to work this out.

Finally, I figured it out. I went to the grocery store and bought a lovely, rainbow-colored bouquet of flowers, then drove back to the marina, walked out the dock to the houseboat, and knocked on the door. My heart was pounding with adrenaline, and I was pretty sure the large man was about to holler at me again or maybe start beating the crap out of me and then throw me in the lake! He answered the door, still frowning and fuming with rage, and he opened his mouth to start yelling at me when he saw the flowers. His mouth remained open, but with amazement.

"I'm here to apologize for getting off on the wrong foot with you, and so I've brought you this peace offering," I said fearfully, and thrust the bouquet into his hand before he knew what I was doing. "I really don't want to cause you a problem, and I wonder if there isn't some solution that works for both of us."

His tone immediately changed. He replied quietly, with a stunned expression on his face, and for the first time he explained the nature of his problem and exactly how I had inconvenienced him and his wife. The woman I had spoken to earlier was a friend and a guest, but she had never relayed my warning that I was turning off their water, so his wife had been caught in the shower with no water pressure -- not a pleasant experience for her. After a few minutes, we were chatting like old friends, and agreed to figure out a solution together.

This experiment was triggered for me by Walter Wink, a philosopher who writes extensively about Christian teachings on nonviolence, notably in his book, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. Wink proposes that nonviolence need not be submisssion to violence, nor a passive retreat from aggression or abuse, but rather should be an active, bold, initiatory striving for justice based on compassion. By responding to the anger and violence of others with a sharp, clear, bold yet nonviolent compassion, we can lay the basis for others to change their behavior, and we can learn how to change ourselves as well.

In rural Czechoslovakia one day in the last year of the war, Jerry Chlup brought home to his wife's care the emaciated and wounded Herman Feder.

Unknown to Anna, Jerry had been a member of a resistance group for three years. When the group blew up a bridge, they inadvertantly forced a German train full of prisoners bound for a death camp, to make an unscheduled halt of several days. Some of the prisoners seized the opportunity to escape, Herman Feder among them. Unstintingly sharing their modest resources, Anna and Jerry devoted themselves over the next three years to nursing Herman back to physical health. They provided a safe haven which helped to heal the deep psychological wounds resulting from Herman's five years of harrowing concentration camp experiences.

Read the words of Anna, Jerry, and Herman at www.humboldt.edu/~rescuers/book/Chlup/c.contents.html

I knew it was my view on life and would eventually learn more about it.  What I did not know was that I would learn that my cultural background is Christianity and my worldview is Humanism.

When I turned nineteen, I left home and joined the Episcopal Church so I could at least say to my family that I was attending church.  To my surprise, the services were peaceful and soothing with the illuminating candles, serene icons, and calming organ music.  Sometimes I would experience those same feelings I felt with my pets and in nature, but it was more than that.  The priests, who were both men and women, spoke of love, not guilt and fear-ridden damnation, and people were equal to each other.  There, God was love and love was God, an experience I had all my life.

Then there was the wonderful Bishop John Shelby Spong who preached everything I always thought life should be.  He taught we should live life fully, love wastefully, and strive to be all we can be as human beings.  Here was my fourth taste of Humanism, only this was Christian Humanism.  Both Bishop Spong and I experience God, not describe it.  I was enamoured by this man, who taught me that God was a human concept and gave me a broader understanding of it.  Later I met a few other Religious Humanists within the Episcopal Church, such as Robert Price, and fell in sync with them, as well as learned a lot from them too.

While reading one of Spong's books I noticed he said something that sounded very much like Humanism and I asked him about it. He replied, "Mriana, Humanism is not anti-Christian or anti-God.  It is through the human that we experience the Holy the Other.  The divine is the ultimate depth of the human."  It was very encouraging to me as a Humanist and I smiled with joy because I knew exactly what he was saying.  He obviously was not rejecting me either because I considered myself a Humanist and just as my atheist great uncle exuded warmth, love, and compassion, so did Bishop Spong through his correspondence to me.

Within this time, my first son was born.  As I held him in my arms and we gazed into each other's eyes for the first time, I felt transcending love.  His beautiful blue-tinted brown eyes were captivating as he studied my face for the first time.  It was like a time-paradox as I welcomed him into the world, because we knew each other, but never met until that moment.  This was untainted numinous love between mother and child.

During my second month of nursing school, our professor gave us a pop quiz.

I was a conscientious student and had breezed through the questions, until I read the last one: "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"

Surely this was some kind of joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times. She was tall, dark haired and in her 50's, but how would I know her name?

I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Just before class ended, one student asked if the last question would count towards our quiz grade. "Absolutely," said the professor. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say 'hello'."

I've never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy.