For the last few years, I have been privileged to participate in imagery classes, run by the inimitable Carol Rose, who was a student of Madame Colette Aboulker-Muscat. Imagery is a form of short, imaginative meditations, designed by Colette to evoke images from our subconscious. Carol does an amazing job with these meditations, and I love doing them with her and the other people in the group.

This week, in the course of one of the exercises, she mentioned the word “compassion”. For whom do we feel compassion? What is compassion, anyway?

Looking for definitions, as I often do, I found that compassion literally means “to suffer together” – it means feeling sympathy and concern for another who appears to be suffering, and wanting to help them feel better. 

I was shocked at what came up for me – I felt a deep compassion for those frightened people who feel threatened by the beautifully diverse world we are creating. Transphobes, homophobes, racists, white supremacists – all of those people against whom my first reaction might be anger and disgust, and especially fear. I can taste their fear, because I am feeling my own. I am full of fear for those whom I love, who are vulnerable to harm from the systems set up to favour “those people”. That fear makes it hard to see “those people” as being also created in the image of the Divine, just like you and me. Every human, even those we fear and distrust and believe would like to harm us, has a pure soul full of sparks of the Divine.

I absolutely believe that we need to fight for human rights and to create a more just world where everyone can thrive. But let’s remember we aren’t fighting orcs. They are all humans, too. Compassion does not have to mean weakness – but it does mean we don’t have to destroy our own souls with hate, to create a better world.

Am I being hopelessly naive? Or does this make sense to you? I’d love to know!