Compassion and Forgiveness

I want to think about the difference between compassion and forgiveness and writing helps me to concentrate, mull over, and absorb it. Also the ideas and opinions of others motivates me to examine my ideas and even reshape them. I sincerely appreciate any help in this endeavor.

Dictionary.com defines compassion as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.

Dictionary.com defines forgiveness as 1. act of forgiving;  state of being forgiven. and 2. disposition or willingness to forgive.

I’ve written before on forgiving stating that if it doesn’t it “should” mean to first-give. By that I mean if someone has hurt you or a loved one the only way to forgive in my mind is to give to them first understanding that they are mistaken or ignorant in their beliefs and if they weren’t they wouldn’t have harmed in the first place.

Being mistaken or ignorant in harming someone is a behavior learned from unfortunate experiences. I’m not saying that a person is not to blame and cannot be held accountable. What I am saying is that realizing that people learn both good and bad behaviors from one another it may be possible to be sorry or compassionate towards a person that blundered into the socially learned web of deceit, lies, and ignorance.
In this way, I believe compassion and forgiveness to have much in common.

Forgiveness as I learned it as a Methodist Christian taught me (if I understood it correctly) that it means to forgive unconditionally as Jesus would if a person asked for forgiveness, or even if they didn’t ask but simply “believe”.
I understand this forgiveness as unconditional love.
Although I see unconditional love and compassion as being very similar, compassion could include conditions, whereas compassion with the kind of forgiveness that I attempted to describe first includes a kind of intellectual understanding based on the judgement that a person is the product of their environment and in a very real way does not know what they are doing.

If I look at the dictionary definition of compassion I notice that the deep sympathy or sorrow for another who is stricken with misfortune is akin to saying I believe misfortune and harmful behaviors can be the same thing. Harmful or aberrant behavior is indeed a misfortune for all involved no matter who or how many are to blame.

In this way it seems that by any definition both compassion and forgiveness are motivated by love even if that love is not something that we have achieved on a constant every-second-of-our-lives basis. It does however seem like a worthy goal and “worthy” feels to me to be grossly understated.

If you’ve gotten this far you may be looking for a point and I believe I might have one and hope that I can hear from and learn from you!

Point 1: I believe no matter how complicated life is, it is worth living. To live is to desire satisfaction and well being at the very least. Not unlike planting a garden, satisfaction and well being require a fertile environment and continual cultivation and tending to reap an abundant harvest. Love, I believe encompasses both compassion and forgiveness though the definitions vary.

Point 2: There is hate in the world. We all learn from and even copy one another. When hate is directed toward us or our loved ones it is very easy to hate. Our desire of satisfaction could easily turn to hate and revenge. We may even feel a sense of well being if we believe in our hate. I can readily understand how a person can hate and even never forgive.

Point 3: Understanding how a person can hate does not necessarily have to be hate itself. Instead it might be love or compassion for the person that hates because they were hurt or worse by another person or persons.

Point 4: Understanding could also be hate itself as you could be in full agreement with the hater and also hate as much or more.

Final Point: I believe that most people, even haters, do not want to be hated. There are physiological aspects of behavior that account for hate and love. Learned behavior, while absolutely affected by our learning capacity, also has a great deal to do with how much or even if, a person loves or hates. I sincerely hope that I can tend to and cultivate a mind set of compassion and forgiveness of love so if me or my loved ones are hated, abused, or worse, I might be able to draw on a life of practicing love. Realize it. Continue to cultivate it. Maybe even pass it on. Love is contagious. Unfortunately so is hate.

15Aug2012