Non-monetary Compassion

I have been asked to give a talk on "compassion for others" in Sacrament Meeting this week, but in the context of the week's given topic (which is also the first speaker's topic), it seems clear that I'll mostly be speaking about a certain kind of compassion. The topic of the week and the first speaker is The Law of Consecration, and the Conference talk I was given to help me prepare my talk is about Infuriating Unfairness. From this, I can guess that I'm meant to focus on monetary compassion, alleviating unfairness by consecrating what we can to ease the suffering of others.

Yet, charity is not what I immediately think of when I think of compassion. The word compassion comes from the Latin "Compati," meaning to "suffer with." Compassion means empathy, or at least sympathy. Compassion means to care about the suffering of others. It has far more to do with emotion than money.

For example, several months ago, I was feeling terribly overwhelmed and frustrated, and I regret to admit that I got upset enough to shout and swear. A family member in another room heard me and sent me a message asking what was going on. When I explained how I felt, my family member told me that I was exaggerating, that I needed to be more adult, and that crude language was never acceptable, or at least, that's how the message felt when I read it. The message that I perceived as exhibiting a severe lack of compassion only added to my frustration, and the conversation devolved further from there until I felt the need to leave the house and silence my phone in order to cool off. Since then, I have often thought that if my family member had responded with compassion and helped me alleviate the feelings of frustration I had felt rather than criticizing me for swearing, that would have been far more effective at getting me to the point where I no long felt like swearing.

Similar situations play out with many kinds of bad behavior. Often, a person "acts out" because of underlying negative feelings. If we practice compassion and help them alleviate the bad feelings, the bad behavior will likely stop as well.

People need compassion. People need to feel heard and felt and understood. It can be tempting to chide them and to offer advice for how they should stop their behavior, but focusing on their behavior merely treats the symptom, not the cause. If we consider why they're doing what they're doing and why they feel how they feel, we can get closer to the root of the issue and help them both feel better and do better.

Naturally, most of this won't go into my talk. In my talk, I'll focus more on the kinds of suffering that monetary and/or material assistance can relieve. But no matter what kinds of suffering we or others are experiencing, one way to help is through practicing sincere, genuine compassion, to care about them and their problems, and to try to help them feel better in any way we can, whether that means giving them financial assistance or giving them patience and sympathy.

I'm ashamed of how I acted that night those months ago, and I hope my family member is, too, but it taught me a valuable lesson. When people are suffering enough to act in ways that cause others to suffer too, they don't need scolding; they need compassion.