“The lighting in both the Amish carriage in the dusk and Robin conquering the beach are spot on. I love gazing at pictures like this. You know they are good because you look at them more than once. They are to be studied like a good piece of literature. Thanks for the beauty, that for not your sharing, I would never have seen.“- Linda Schwab

In his gentle writing about the spirit, Henri Nouwen often writes about the compassionate life.

He has been a considerable inspiration for me when we started to do our work in the Army Of Good in 2016; that’s where I got the idea for small acts of great kindness, the theme and driving ideology behind our work.

Nouwen doesn’t think of the compassionate life as a life of heroic self-denial. You don’t have to be Mother Teresa or St. Francis.

The compassionate life is not about big things, but small things – buying sneakers for an older man with painful feet, talking a refugee student out of quitting high school.

“The question that truly counts,” writes Nouwen  in Here And Now: Living In the Spirit, “is whether we are open to the many little sufferings of those with whom we share our life.”

That’s where we got the idea of small acts of great kindness. What I’ve learned is that small acts of kindness are the life of the spirit.

I’m not a Christian, but the compassionate life is a very Christian idea, preached by Jesus Christ and many of his followers and disciples. The Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim faiths also embrace this idea of compassion.

Yet few people of any faith seem drawn to practice it. Is compassion,I wonder, a natural behavior?

The compassionate life seems to have been left behind in 2021 in much of America.  Most people want to be rich and successful, not compassionate. More and more, we blame the poor and the needy for being vulnerable.

If only they would work harder, say our politicians, they would be better. It feels sometimes as if we have become a harsh, even cruel, culture.

The compassionate life is not especially dramatic. You don’t have to be a saint. But it is often an invisible life.

The people who need help rarely make the news.

The challenge is to be compassionate to those whose suffering remains hidden from the rest of the world: the older woman without warm clothes in the winter, the refugee family that sleeps in one room in the freezing because the heating oil money is needed for food; the suffering of gay and trans people who are isolated from their families and friends, the old couple that can’t afford their medicines, the hungry children.

I think of the people struggling to make car payments or rent, whose loved ones are sick and need help, who can’t find good work.

Compassion is not pity, nor is it rescue.

Compassion means getting close to the one who suffers and figuring out what small act of kindness can help the most. Compassion is the Army Of Good.

It is a gift to receive; it is as big a gift to give. The most beautiful element of the compassionate life is that it is a two-way thing; it can’t be done alone.

There is a beautiful mutuality of giving and receiving, a shared exchange that transcends charity.

Accepting our own pain and suffering is the birth of compassion; it’s a heartbeat.

Food gift cards, for example, are a wonderful example of small things. This is a Godsend in a compassionate life.

For little money, people in need can be helped with food and soap and toilet paper without feeling shame or having to beg for help.

The compassionate person, says Nouwen, calls us to be aware of our own suffering to help other people in theirs.

In recent years, I had realized that the moments of my greatest comfort and joy in life came when someone came to me and said, “I cannot take your pain away, I cannot save you or solve your problems, but I can promise you that I won’t run away from you or leave you alone and will stay close to you for as long as I can.”

Maria is the only person who has ever said those things to me and me , and then I said them to her.

This is what we both needed to hear, the small acts of great kindness that sustained us through our hurricanes. I learned so much from that.

The greatest gift one can give to the suffering is to show them they do not have to live a life of grief and pain alone. That is to be the essence of faith and true spirituality.

When I first went to the Mansion Assisted Care Facility, I found Connie, a woman whose twisted spine kept her in constant pain, who uses a wheelchair,  sitting alone in her room, watching the television that she hated to watch.

She was an exceptionally selfless person; she had moved into assisted care because she didn’t want her children to become her caretakers when she got sick.

“I got to live my life, ” she said, “they are entitled to theirs.”

I asked her one night what she loved to do most in the world, and she said she loved to knit, but she left that behind her; she had no needles or yarn, they all stayed behind when she came to assisted care. She saw it as a part of the lost past, impossible to reclaim or bring with her.

I suggested it could be part of the new future. She just laughed.

I mentioned this on my blog that night, and over the next weeks, box after box of yarn, needles, patterns, and the fabric came pouring into the Mansion and her room.

She was sitting straight up in her chair, her pain forgotten. “I’ve decided to make skull caps for children who are in intensive care and need hats to keep warm.”

And so she did.

The yarn kept coming, so did the caps,  until every hospital in the area had received each one, and every infant in intensive care was warm.

I saw Connie come back to life through her knitting; she was so overjoyed to be useful and help those children. She made hats and scarves for the other residents, even warm socks for the winter.

Maria came to meet Connie, and the two of them became fast friends; Maria often came to talk with Connie about fabric and yarn.  Connie was afraid she has lost her skills. Maria encouragd her and offered moral support.

Connie brightened; the aides said she was a different person.  I think of that experience as a turning point in my life as well as hers.

She had transformed herself from victim to helper. She made those caps until she was taken away in an ambulance and died in a hospital a few days later. It took nothing more than for someone to say she wasn’t alone; she had value.

The gift of compassion is so often small and barely visible. But it not small to the people who are touched and loved and helped.

The compassionate life is not always happy or uplifting. It also teaches me my limits, reminds me of what I can’t, confronts me with as many failures as successes.

I suppose that’s where the spiritual part comes in.  I learned to accept it as a gift either way. Because it wasn’t always about helping them, it was, when all is said and done, about helping me.