Compassion is More Creative Than Contempt

Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

I was gifted a collection of poems this past weekend, annotated by Irish poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama. As I read one of his annotations, I was stopped by this small sentence: “Compassion is more creative than contempt.”

I’ve thought for days about what that means.

In all my research about liberatory systems change, compassion rises again and again as a critical practice. Two weeks ago, I was making that point in a talk to a group of 60 or so educators in New York City. With a slide on the screen behind me about compassion, I asked the audience what they thought it meant. Some said empathy. Others, sympathy. Still others considered the root of the word: suffering-with. One woman compared compassion with the soft pink scarf she wore around her neck.

A woman across the room raised her hand. As a Black woman, she said, she objected to the idea that somehow, she was harming equity if she did not suffer with, feel sympathy for, or worse, offer herself like that soft pink scarf to white folks who struggled with racism. That, she said, was their work, not hers.

I agreed. In fact, I apologized for my lack of clarity, told the crowd I needed to add another slide.

Because the compassion I mean is steely.

My understanding of compassion comes from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of mainstream Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama defines compassion as a state of mind that doesn’t want to cause suffering. Compassion can mitigate fear, he says, and offer strength to take on challenges. “True compassion,” he writes, “is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason.”

From a place of committed, reasoned compassion, I can pay close attention to those who would do me or others harm. Contempt, on the other hand, leaves no room to consider the other as whole and complex, and there’s little space in that to consider creative, effective response. Contempt requires energy I can’t spare.

The late poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote in the poem For Each of Us, “You will never defend your city/while shouting.” Contempt shouts. Steely compassion, is determinedly nonaggressive, precisely in order to conserve energy for resisting and mitigating its own and others impulse to harm.

Consider Reuben Jackson. Reuben was a Jazz critic and curator, a DJ with the smoothest voice I have ever heard, and a poet. When Reuben died suddenly last week, he left a huge swath of shock and grief in his two home places of Vermont and Washington, DC. Reuben and I liked each other a lot, and though we weren’t close, he left me voicemails saying things like, “I’m glad you’re on the planet.” Others in my extended family feel his loss more sharply, as a chosen uncle and a close, close friend.

When I say this man was beloved, it is not nearly a big enough word. He was beloved by hundreds. He offered love like a river, and the people gifted by that flow were strikingly varied in culture and class and race. He was among the most gentle, kind, and unpretentious people I’ve ever met. His compassion was pure and true.

And he was unstinting in his critique of the insidious racism in Vermont that drove him back to Washington, DC, though he missed his loves here terribly. His poems didn’t flinch from his experience of being a Black man in the world.

Calmly, artfully, Reuben’s poetry reveals racism’s thousand cuts: suspicious storekeepers (“like the man wearing the/end apartheid button/who followed me across his bookstore”); cursory celebrations of Black experience (“Everyone loves your people/until March arrives.”); unrelenting, othering stares:

If a middle-aged Black man
Enters a subway car
And no one stares
As if my people
Were new to the planet

Hell yes
My soul makes a sound.

Audre Lorde also famously wrote that poetry is not a luxury, because poetry reveals the underside of things like nothing else can, and in so doing invites response, invites change.  Reuben could write the poems he did, I believe, exactly because he viewed the world—the imperfect, too often racist world—with compassion. He never bothered with contempt.  Compassion was more creative. 

On the Saturday after Reuben died, I spent part of the afternoon re-reading his last published collection of poems. Then I started on Pádraig Ó Tuama’s anthology. It took me until early this week to really understand why that line stopped me:  It’s not only because it affirms the work I choose. It’s because I’d been hanging on to the light that was Reuben, shining from beyond life in his poems, rejecting contempt, insisting on change.