Compassion: Love in Action

It's 8 a.m. Prime time in the elementary school drop-off line. In other words: the first moment of my day to truly test the limits of my love for humankind.

I can wake up feeling refreshed and well rested. I can start my day with a peaceful moment of prayer on the back deck, coffee in hand and the whole day shimmering lovely ahead of me. I can laugh through breakfast with my children, kiss my spouse good-bye, and head out the door in comfortable shoes with a fully charged phone. I am like Snow White, complete with birds singing around my head. All is right with the world.

But then, there's the car line. There's a person in a giant SUV making an illegal left turn into the school to cut in line — because clearly rules don't apply to them and they are in a hurry and they are important — and I am suddenly filled with rage. All that deep yoga breathing and morning prayer goes out the window, and I become the worst caricature of suburban life. "They only send home a weekly paper note and a daily email, reminding you to go to the back of the line!" I shout to no one. "It's completely understandable that you don't know any better!"

At least my windows are tinted. So I've got that going for me.

Love is the first family value. Most people, from any background or faith framework, would claim it as a critical core of belief, whether that means love of family, love for community and neighbor, or love for creation. The trouble is ... love can become a cultural abstraction, impossibly vague and intangible. Love can be easily reduced to a word on a page or a greeting card sentiment, hijacked by the entertainment industry for the purposes of another formulaic rom-com, or applied haphazardly to the most surface-level things in our lives. I love coffee. And wine. And Harry Potter. And vacation. I really love vacation. And also wine. Especially after a week of navigating the drop-off line. Mercy.

We "love" lots of things that we can name, touch, taste, and see. And yet, the same expression of "love" gets applied, uniformly, to our most meaningful connections. Clearly, my love for, say, the perfect BLT is not the same as my love for my children. Or the love that a church family expresses in caring community.

How can we root a values system in love when the means of expression are so nebulous? The pitfalls of this "loving" ambiguity are not just related to language. The greater concern is that within the language of love there are any number of ways to enact hate, judgment, fear, and scarcity on the people around us, while still calling it a loving value. Telling Jewish people they are going to hell, for instance: but hey, it's just "speaking the truth in love." Or kicking a gay child out of the church or family while claiming to "love the sinner, but hate the sin."

That kind of love doesn't feel very loving. And yet, the word is the same.

It is one thing to verbally claim love as the root of a values system. It's another thing entirely to let compassion do the driving in everything, from our casual interactions to our most important relationships. But if we could learn to do just that, it would be a game changer — not just for our lives and families, but also for the world around us.

There's a word for love with skin on it: compassion.

Many communal values systems operate from that "love the sinner, hate the sin" perspective. Nuance that phrase any number of ways, but hate cannot abide that closely to love without fundamentally tarnishing love's good intentions. That is love that lives on the surface, but lacks arms and legs; love that is well-meaning, but still lets judgment do most of the talking.

On the surface, "family values" culture may look like warm, fuzzy stuff: Love, loyalty, and strong relationships. Start pulling on some of those threads, though, and we uncover the many ways in which love is limited, and relationships are rigidly defined — even confining. In any number of ways, love — in its vague abstractions — leaves a lot of room for hate to creep in around the edges. And not just hate — fear, rage, passive aggression, and any number of social ills that come from well-meaning sentimentality but ultimately become destructive forces in our lives and families.

Compassion, on the other hand, doesn't leave room for judgment or fear, or exclusion, or rigid parameters of belonging. Why? Because compassion is work. And those who are busy, every day, enacting compassion on the world have neither the time nor the brain space available for deciding who's in and who's out, for flinching at any sign of "otherness," or for the general shenanigans of moral posturing.

And this is where values have the power to reshape us and our world. When we can truly identify what our core values are — beyond abstraction, sound bites, and bumper stickers — they move to the center of our lives. When we nurture those values, they expand, leaving no space for that which tears down others, wastes our time, and distracts us from the holiness inherent in all things.

Our values system is naturally rooted in that which we love. Love is our primary human compass. But let love just sit there — a thing we feel, or a word we say — and so many other things can work their way into our lives and hearts. Compassion is the exercise by which that love takes on flesh in our own faith, our family, and the world.

My early morning rant in the car line might not be hurting anyone. It is not overtly hateful or harmful. But what I've come to realize — as I explore my values and the ways in which they can direct my life, home, and faith practice — is that the "harmless" anxiety and rage that crop up in these everyday moments are not entirely harmless after all.

For instance: I catch myself wanting to roll down the window and shout at one dad in a giant pickup truck, "You can't do that! You have to go to the back of the line like everyone else!" I want to lay on the horn (OK, sometimes I have laid on the horn) and wildly gesture that there is a line here, and you are straight-up breaking the first and primary rule of kindergarten: wait your eff'n turn, bro.

But, let's say that I allow myself to indulge that compulsion. I yell, I honk, I act like a deranged caricature of suburbia, but then, say, two weeks later, I realize that guy's kid is in my kid's class, and we are on the Halloween party planning committee together. Suddenly, I find that I don't want to be so involved in my kid's class this year after all. My momentary anger has damaged a longer term relationship — not just with this one family but with an entire network of families who will...