Compassion is much on my mind, I am writing a book called “Saving Simon: How A Rescue Donkey Taught Me The Meaning Of Compassion”, and this week, in honor of the holiday I am reading what some of the better minds of our world have to say about it.

Compassion is the most challenging ethic for me, I love the idea of it, I find its practice a constant challenge and frustration, if I am getting better, I have a long ways to go. Compassion is, I think the foundation of all ethics, the most powerful aspiration, the most noble trait in a human. If you look at our political system, the most striking thing about it is the absence of compassion people with differing ideas show for one another. There is no empathy for those who stand in the truths of others.  A poor truth about the people who are supposed to be leading and inspiring us.

The Dalai Lama is perhaps the world’s leading prophet of compassion, he says love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries, without them humanity cannot survive. If you wish to be truly happy, he says, practice compassion. It’s true, I am happy when I compassionate. But what is compassion? Most great thinkers define it as empathy, the ability to put oneself in anothers shoes. Nelson Mandela wrote that compassion binds us to one another, teaches us how to turn our common suffering into hope for others, for the future. Albert Schweitzer said the purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others. Frederick Buechner wrote that compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. Francis of Assisi said that if we exclude any of God’s creatures from compassion and pity, we will have men who will mistreat their fellow human beings.

There is this common theme among all of the great philosophers that we must be compassionate to all things, not just some things, Thomas Merton says we are all connected, we are all part of one thing.

There seems to be nearly universal agreement about what compassion is – Jesus said it was love of the poor and suffering – yet it seems to be a struggle for anyone I know who isn’t the Dalai Lama, and probably for him as well. Can we put ourselves in the shoes of people who kill and maim, rape and torture? We all seem to have the capacity for compassion, but it seems to perpetually war with so many other parts of ourselves – fear, envy, suspicion, greed, power.

I meet many people who are compassionate to people, but not animals, and many who love animals but seem to hate people. None of the wonderful thinker’s I’ve been reading accept compassion in so limited a form – compassion, they say, can’t be so limited. The very idea of compassion seems almost a joke in our culture, a Saturday Night Live skit, a Jon Stewart joke. No one in our public life ever speaks it, it is not a subject for cable news or the movies. Pope Francis has gripped the imagination of the world by talking about it.

How, I wonder, did compassion fall so out of favor in our world, every religion on the earth preaches the practice of it? Is it antithetical to human nature? I’m not a social historian or theologist, in my own life animals have taught me the most about being compassionate, I embrace Thomas Aquinas’s idea that the reason to treat animals with mercy is that it makes us better human beings. Compassion is something to which I aspire, it is something I achieve only occasionally. Perhaps, like spirituality itself, it’s a long road and you never quite get there. For me, compassion can mean many things, not just rescue and the preservation of life.

I have had two important experiences with compassion recently, both have taught me about myself. One was when I felt some sympathy for the jailed Boston bomber suspect, I thought it sad that this young man threw his life and the lives of other people away and I wrote about that. A number of people were outraged at that idea, they said he deserved no compassion. The other was when we took Simon into the farm, and I wondered about the farmer, I tried to put myself in his shoes, to imagine how he could have seen so soulfully impoverished as to let an animal in his care suffer like that. Another was when I decided it was more human to put Rocky down that let him struggle through another winter. I see compassion through different prisms.

These encounters opened windows in my mind about compassion and my own experience of it. I am aware of its importance and it’s difficulties. I saw that it is very difficult to be compassion about people who do hateful things, people I don’t like, it is much easier when they are good people I love and appreciate. When they are nice.

Compassion is a work in progress for me, I am often wary and suspicious and judgmental, traits that have always worked to protect me. Compassion is, in some ways, about opening up, and that always seems fearful and dangerous. The human soul is complicated and confusing, it gives us all of these noble aspirations and plenty of tools and emotions to balance them and take them away. I have a lot of questions, not a lot of answers. Good subject for me to think about during Christmas  week..