Compassion

I heard religious historian Karen Armstrong today talking about her call for compassion statement. I also was thinking about the young man who shot and killed those people yesterday in Arizona. Like everyone else, I was outraged by the notion that someone could do such a thing. But then I steeped back and thought about what it must have felt like to be him. What are his parents going through? It was that moment that I realized that I was losing touch with the essence of our practice - - - compassion. I, for one, find compassiom easy to talk about, but hard to practice from moment to moment. Where is compassion in my attempts at mindfulness? What else is there if there is no compassion? It seems to fade quickly when we are confronted by the painful and inexplicable. Yet, those are precisely the moments when our compassion is tested most. Think of the shooter in Arizona; how long did it take for your thinking to shift to some compassion for him. I'd be willing to bet that few of us started with that feeling. Perhaps that is one of the lessons we take from this sad event. Our compassion should hold no limits. We should extend the same empathy and compassion we feel for the victims and their families to the shooter and his. After all, isn't relieving pain and suffering wherever we find our practice?