Exclusive compassion
on the lie of the charmed life
Remember middle school and that lesson on figurative language?
I’m guessing you know what I mean: figurative language is words that work beyond themselves, that don’t just say a thing in order to tell you something, but that somehow create an experience. They draw a picture in your mind, help you see— or taste, hear, feel— something the writer sees that, on the page in front of you, isn’t actually there.
And you’ll remember the finer distinctions: personification, simile, metaphor. Hyperbole.
Similes made sense to me: “a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’.” For one assignment, we had to write a list of them. One of mine: “The witch’s nose was like a bumpy, green pickle.”
I was proud of myself.
Metaphors were harder. These were comparisons without using “like” or “as,” and this didn’t make sense: how does one make a comparison without actually making a comparison? I remember resorting to removing the “like,” and it worked well enough: “The witch’s nose was a bumpy, green pickle.” But the power of metaphor didn’t gain traction for me for a long time. A college Creative Writing class required a poem employing an extended metaphor, and I wrote a longish series of lines about a true event when I was four years old, flying a kite with my father and older sister on an October day at the beach.
The description was good. My professor said so, and she also pointed out that the poem lacked a metaphor. I’d made a personal experience vivid for my reader, and that was it: a narrative told in truncated lines, attached to nothing.
I’ve practiced since with the power of metaphor, how it can work to underscore an idea or, better yet, replace and thereby enhance it. One of my favorite scenes in my novel is the narrator’s recollection of playing in her driveway as a child. Her father was washing the car, and the rivulets of water that streamed down the macadam became for her an imagined landscape. Water and landscape are important metaphors in that book, and the scene works as a kind of foreshadowing.
Metaphors in literature are wonderful things for many reasons, one of which is their function as invitation. With metaphor, the writer intentionally opens a door for the reader to engage and interpret. Reading in this way isn’t merely a matter of digestion. It’s participation: the writer and her reader working together.
Here’s something about rain that I wrote almost twenty years ago. I’m including it here because it relates to this little discourse on metaphor. See if you can tell what the metaphor means.
Rain, 27 August 2007 Bill and I stepped out of the store and walked toward the car. We’d gone about fifteen paces when I realized I was getting wet; I looked down and saw the smallest drop of water on my forearm. “What’s this on my skin?” I wondered out loud. And then, “Oh, it’s raining.” “Funny,” Bill said. “I’ve known it was raining since we stepped outside.” The clouds weren’t dark overhead. At least, they were only dark in places. The sun was shining. What clouds there were didn’t look as though they meant business. *** We drove over Route 40 and looked down at the traffic. “Looks like it rained hard there,” Bill said. And sure enough, the pavement was dark from the water, and the cars’ bumpers and taillights were softened by the fine spray they tossed up in their wake. *** I don’t know how old I was on that summer day when I stood with Jill and Janet on Oaklawn Dr. in Pittsburgh. I think maybe Laura was there, too, and my sister Emily. We stood at the edge of Jill's driveway and looked down their street. The street rolled somewhat, as all streets do in Pittsburgh. We looked and we could see– very distinctly– that it was raining at the end of that street. Just a few houses away, in fact, we could see rain was falling there: a sheet of gray, or a deepening of color, and the sound of it: the hiss and splash of individual drops that, gathered together, are like someone asking for peace. *** We saw this, too, in June on the Masai Mara. Kenya’s share of the Serengeti, here the savannah rolls on and on, interrupted only by the lone acacia or the head and neck of a giraffe. Eventually hills loom and block the view, but these are very far away. Sometimes as we rode along, we watched a storm spill over a far-off stretch of land. The sky took on shades of dark blue and deep plum there; lightning cut through the blue; a sheet of gray, or a deepening of color, and no sound but the wind in Kenya’s blond grass and the rattle of our matatu’s diesel engine, the wheels feeling their way along the red, rutted road. *** No matter where it's raining, the rain must also stop, yes? It finds a place it won't fall, a line it won't cross, a patch that must, this time, stay dry. Sometimes that line is invisible. The rain thunders down on your roof and every roof for miles around, and you can't imagine but that it's been raining for your whole life, that there's nowhere in the world that doesn’t know rain right now. And sometimes that line is just there on the Mara, or at the other end of Oaklawn Drive, or it cuts through your own backyard.
Maybe that’s nice if you’re a person who likes rain. But what’s the metaphor?
That’s a trick question. There’s no metaphor here. Like the poem about the kite on the beach, this little series of paragraphs doesn’t contain a metaphor at all because I never made the necessary, implicit connection.
I was writing about a challenged friendship: I think we simply had different perceptions about how to communicate. I felt that we were forever failing to understand each other, and I worried that I was often somehow offensive to her, but it was my guess to figure out when and why.
The rain was meant to represent this difference: that some people like things plain and straightforward, and some don’t.
On Saturday I caught up with a loved one over lunch. Once upon a time she was my student, but now she’s fully grown up, practicing law in far off New England, and we hadn’t talked at length since October.
Suddenly she mentioned that it was raining. Maybe she said it because of the weather reports: we knew storms were pending; or because she knew we’ve been in a serious dry spell. Or maybe she mentioned it because we both love rain. But in any event, she said it was raining and, when I looked out the window closest to me, I saw no rain at all.
From her seat, she could easily see out two windows, but neither of these were an easy view for me. From her perspective, the rain was obvious. From mine, it didn’t seem to exist.
It’s a tendency of human nature, it would seem, to divide people into categories. Have you noticed this? I’ve seen it all my life, and there’s good humor and maybe some wisdom in it. Some people squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube. Some people are risk-takers. Some don’t like chocolate. Some are pessimists.
For every category, an opposite exists by default. City-life or country? Mountains or beach? Introvert or extrovert? These classifications can be insightful. They can help us understand ourselves and each other. And they’re fun.
But a different kind of classification troubles me, and I see it with increasing frequency online. It’s the tendency of a writer or influencer to distinguish people who are happy.
This sounds strange at first blush, but the writers do it intentionally because they’re building online communities based on suffering. In order to build sympathy within that community, they must mark its borders, which is done by identifying people who aren’t like them. In their view, there are two kinds of people: those who have known hardship, and those who haven’t. Those who haven’t are the happy ones, the so-called beautiful ones, the untarnished lovelies who haven’t yet lost their shine.
The sympathetic community is one kind of people, and the shining beauties are the other.
What could be wrong with this? People who suffer need community. They require it. What a relief to find someone— even if that someone is online— who understands and is sympathetic to your pain!
The problem here lies in the notion of exceptionality, which is a lie. There’s no such thing as a charmed life. No one lives their days, sunrise to sunset, without pain, loss, or hurt. Everyone loses their shine.
No, we don’t all suffer bullying, eating disorders, financial ruin, abuse, addiction, miscarriage. But we all suffer from something. It may be that the beautiful only look that way because it’s too painful for them to appear otherwise: the vulnerability and openness that are grace to some might, in fact, be too raw and painful for someone else, so they keep their pain inside. Or maybe they’ve found a way to live in joy in spite of what they’ve suffered.
When going through a particularly difficult and painful time, I would often attempt to dismiss my suffering. Other people have it worse than me, I thought. It didn’t seem right to want relief or to need sympathy when other troubles outweighed mine.
In a way, I was right: other people did have it worse than me. Yes, things were difficult, but I had a happy marriage and healthy children. I lived in the United States, for crying out loud, enjoying a life far easier than most of the millions living in developing nations.
But if receiving compassion is contingent on who needs it most, then there’s lots of work to be done in finding out who deserves it.
I asked myself where God’s compassion begins. Automatically he can rule out pretty much anyone living in the West, what with our running water, paved roads, and local hospitals. He needs to measure suffering by category, degree, and case, comparing this need with that, dismissing the milder ones. By my reasoning, his compassion would come down to the one person suffering the most. I reasoned further: this person would most likely be female and likely a child, one barely subsisting in an impoverished corner of the world.
This is terrible theology.
Christianity is judged for being judgmental, but it doesn’t draw anywhere near the distinctions attributed to it. In fact, I can think of very few, with two important ones coming at the beginning.
The first is between God and his creation: He is the Maker, and everything else is the Made. The second lies between humankind, made in his image, and the rest of the created order, over which we’re to be stewards and caretakers in service to God.
Why caretakers? Because all of it is precious to him: “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.”1 Implicit here: all of his creation is in need of his compassion, and God answers that need.
There’s a thought.
As humans made in his image to care for his creation, we’re to follow suit in terms of that compassion. We’re not to judge people from the outside, (for example) distinguishing the needy from the well-off.
We’re to look on each other with generosity and sympathy. Even people we don’t know personally. Even people who have hurt us.
Here’s another thought: if it’s written in our makeup to look at the world with compassion, if being human entails a spirit of sensitivity to all, then regarding someone— anyone— as undeserving is actually inhumane.
Why are we like this? Why do we categorize people, disregarding some and elevating others? Or why do we doubt our own need, belittling our circumstances in view of someone else’s?
I wonder if it’s because we don’t really believe in a God who sees and knows us just as we are, who doesn’t actually compare our problems to anyone else’s but simply wants to bring us comfort and meet our needs.
Paul speaks of him this way: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort….”
(That phrase: “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” is enough to ponder for days.)
Continuing “…who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.2
The charge made by distinction in Genesis— that humans are made in God’s image— continues here in the New Testament. And those who have known the comfort and goodness of God are best enabled by him to extend these to anyone— everyone— who has need.
Sitting at our table between windows, this dear former student and I appeared needy to exactly no one. Neither did anyone else. At the very least, we’d presumably all arrived in our own cars to a nice lunch spot and had our choices from the menu.
Yet my young friend is enduring suffering I’ve never known and probably never will, and I’ve known suffering she’s only imagined. Neither of us has had a charmed life because— remember— there’s no such thing. We’re both simply learning to depend on the grace and goodness of Christ.
Gloriously, these are available to anyone who wants them. There are no excluding categories or conditions for coming to God— except, maybe, the need to acknowledge your need.
In Revelation, the apostle John recorded his vision of the people who will know and worship God at the end of time. He calls them “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language.”3
Literally anyone. That’s not a metaphor.
A dear reader sent me this poem via email a little while ago. I’m delighted to share it with you here.
Rain in Summer How beautiful is the rain! After the dust and heat, In the broad and fiery street, In the narrow lane, How beautiful is the rain! How it clatters along the roofs, Like the tramp of hoofs How it gushes and struggles out From the throat of the overflowing spout! Across the window-pane It pours and pours; And swift and wide, With a muddy tide, Like a river down the gutter roars The rain, the welcome rain! The sick man from his chamber looks At the twisted brooks; He can feel the cool Breath of each little pool; His fevered brain Grows calm again, And he breathes a blessing on the rain. From the neighboring school Come the boys, With more than their wonted noise And commotion; And down the wet streets Sail their mimic fleets, Till the treacherous pool Ingulfs them in its whirling And turbulent ocean. In the country, on every side, Where far and wide, Like a leopard's tawny and spotted hide, Stretches the plain, To the dry grass and the drier grain How welcome is the rain! In the furrowed land The toilsome and patient oxen stand; Lifting the yoke encumbered head, With their dilated nostrils spread, They silently inhale The clover-scented gale, And the vapors that arise From the well-watered and smoking soil. For this rest in the furrow after toil Their large and lustrous eyes Seem to thank the Lord, More than man's spoken word. Near at hand, From under the sheltering trees, The farmer sees His pastures, and his fields of grain, As they bend their tops To the numberless beating drops Of the incessant rain. He counts it as no sin That he sees therein Only his own thrift and gain. These, and far more than these, The Poet sees! He can behold Aquarius old Walking the fenceless fields of air; And from each ample fold Of the clouds about him rolled Scattering everywhere The showery rain, As the farmer scatters his grain. He can behold Things manifold That have not yet been wholly told,-- Have not been wholly sung nor said. For his thought, that never stops, Follows the water-drops Down to the graves of the dead, Down through chasms and gulfs profound, To the dreary fountain-head Of lakes and rivers under ground; And sees them, when the rain is done, On the bridge of colors seven Climbing up once more to heaven, Opposite the setting sun. Thus the Seer, With vision clear, Sees forms appear and disappear, In the perpetual round of strange, Mysterious change From birth to death, from death to birth, From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth; Till glimpses more sublime Of things, unseen before, Unto his wondering eyes reveal The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel Turning forevermore In the rapid and rushing river of Time. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Once again, I’m happy to extend a warm welcome to new readers! Thank you— new and less so— for being here. Your presence means a great deal to me, truly.
As ever, I welcome your response in the comments. And as usual, a fun language-related prompt because that’s often how we do: send us all a metaphor in the comments! It can be one you love out there in music, literature, whathaveyou. Or it can be one of your own devising.
I love metaphors, truly. Don’t you?
With joy,
Rebecca
Psalm 145: 9
2 Corinthians 1: 3-4
Revelation 7:9b
To see another clearly and to truly be seen is refreshment.
A line from Seven Years by The Cowboy Junkies (borrowed from Gabriel Márquez) has been swirling about the brain recently: "Memories are just dead men making trouble."