July 1, 2012 | 8:00 a.m.

A Public Pathos

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 122
2 Samuel 1:1, 17–27

“Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places! How the mighty have fallen! . . . O daughters of Israel, weep.”

2 Samuel 1:19, 24a (NRSV)

God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

Twelfth-century philosophers, as quoted in Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books

It is not unusual for history to be told through the lives of heroes. Until the early twentieth century, before Marxism made its mark on how history might be understood, history was told almost exclusively through the lives of larger-than-life personalities, kings and queens, presidents, and military generals. Through them we have come to know the birth, rise, and demise of nations; the victories, defeats, and turning points in battles; and the political, social, and religious movements that have shaped the world. The most public events in human history have been told through the life stories of prominent people.

The history of ancient Israel has also been told through the stories of its heroes. For Israel, however, the main hero working through its history has always been Yahweh. Though hidden, God has been active in the lives of the Israelites, faithfully guiding each generation into a radically new future. Through the persons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God formed the tribes of Israel; through Moses, God liberated Israel from slavery to a foreign power; and through Kings Solomon, Saul, and David, despite God’s reluctance for Israel to become a monarchy, God remained faithful, guiding Israel as it underwent the extraordinary change from a system of tribes based on kinship ties to a monarchy, centralized and bureaucratized.

Despite the radical social and political reconfiguration of Israel from tribes to monarchy, from local to national, from clan to kingdom, Israel chose to continue telling the story of a hidden God at work through the particular, personal lives of individuals. I find this remarkable.

It may not seem so remarkable when we note that for much of human history rulers have legitimated their right to rule either by claiming that they themselves are divine or that they represent the divine. Rulers have often wielded such claims as tools for their own rise or right to power. Aware and wary of abuses such as these, Yahweh warns Israel about the danger in which it places itself when it places itself under a monarch’s rule. The danger is idolatry: usurping the sovereignty that belongs to God alone, a king would abuse his right to rule for his own selfish purposes. Though Israel insists on taking this political path, it nevertheless takes God’s warning to heart, viewing its kings with scrutiny and realism. It is this realism that I find remarkable. The ancient nation of Israel is realistic not only about David, but also about God. In its realistic portrayal of David, Israel grounds its understanding of how God is at work in history.

In the extensive treatment of David in the Bible, we come to know a hero up close and personal. With the exception of Jesus, no other person receives such sustained attention in the Bible as does David. We come to know David’s failings and faults. There is no pious cover-up or glossing over of his sometimes-less-than-noble motivations, his use of power to seduce, or even his reliance on brutality. Instead of treating David with hype, pomp, and honor, Israel treats him with a realism by which we can see all too well the human condition. We are given opportunity to scrutinize him, his strengths and weaknesses, his loves and fears, and most of all his passion.

Writing about Israel’s preoccupation with David, scholar and friend of this congregation Walter Brueggemann has observed that both Israel and David have a distinctive capacity for passion, or pathos. It was his distinctive capacity for pathos that made David a hero in Israel’s heart. “In this passionate man,” Brueggemann writes, “Israel discerned something more than David, . . . a purpose larger than David’s purpose and a passion more faithful than even the considerable passion of David” (Interpretation, First and Second Samuel, p. 2).

Passion is built into human nature. The church used to teach, and some still do, that passion is the source of all moral problems, that passion leads to sin. If we could just control our passions, we would act less selfishly, less self-centeredly, less self-defensively. Over the centuries, as theologians and moral philosophers became more nuanced in their thinking, they began to make moral distinctions between kinds of passions, no longer ruling passion per se as problematic. That people are passionate is a given. Morality depends not on the absence or presence of passion in people, but on the quality of our passions. Now most moral philosophers would say that morality wouldn’t be possible without passion.

We are all passionate about things, people, and purposes. Distinctive about David was his capacity to be passionate about people beyond himself and purposes beyond his own. He was sensitive to and passionate about what was at work not just in his own private, personal sphere, but in the whole of God’s realm. Unlike an opportunist who looks at people and situations as means for self-advancement or self-gain, David had a sense that God, though hidden, was present in events, people, and situations, with divine purposes that went beyond his own interests.

So even when King Saul, by whose orders David’s life had been threatened, dies, clearing the way for David himself to become king over Israel, David does not rejoice. Instead, he grieves, and moreover he means to teach Israel also to grieve. David’s lament over the deaths of Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan is powerful, passionate, and public. It is a statement not only of personal pathos, but also of public testimony. In ordering the lament to be taught to the people of Judah, to be written down for public record, David intends for this testimony to stand as a corrective to the selfish responses of the Philistines and Amalekites, enemies of Israel who were without a doubt exulting at Saul’s demise, and to the gossip among the people spreading false and irresponsible reports of Saul’s death. Unlike David, these rumor mongers and political enemies failed to see in Saul “the Lord’s anointed” and thereby failed to recognize and honor in Saul and Jonathan God’s presence and God’s purpose.

We often treat grief as the most private and personal of human emotions, to be shared within a very close circle of family and friends. What we find in this story is that grief becomes the occasion for transcending one’s own and others’ partiality and partisanship. Grief becomes the first public occasion for David to act as Israel’s new leader. As a leader, he must transcend his own private feelings about Saul and call forth from the public a passion that also can transcend self-serving interests so that, whether foe or friend, all may genuinely grieve.

What kind of passion enables leaders to transcend private interests and purposes? What kind of passion enables ordinary people to care about the public good and not just about their private gain?

In a book called Tattoos on the Heart, Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle writes story after story about “the power of boundless compassion.” Compassion is the only kind of passion that truly has public power; it is the only kind of passion that can transcend one’s own interests, one’s own situation, one’s own purposes, to care about someone else’ interest, some other situation, some other purpose. As an associate pastor at Dolores Mission Church, the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese, Father Gregory began a lifelong ministry among gang members. He writes, “If Los Angeles was the gang capital of the world, our little postage-stamp-size area on the map was the gang capital of L.A. I buried my first young person killed because of gang violence in 1988, and as of this writing [published in 2010], I have been called upon for this sad task an additional 167 times” (Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, p. 2). In the course of his ministry, Father Gregory, with the help of a successful Hollywood agent who wanted to do some good with his money, converted an old bakery into a business called Homeboy Industries. Employing gang members, Homeboy Industries became a bakery, a tattoo removal business, and a mental health counseling, case management, employment services, and legal services center.

After two decades, the city of Los Angeles has gotten to know Homeboy Industries and Father Gregory. In his collection of stories, he wants us to get to know these gang members, and with the same kind of realism that was used in the Bible to depict David’s life, Father Gregory talks about the lives of gang members in L.A. He does not airbrush their flaws or their features. Like the ancient Israelites who sought to tell the story of how God was at work in their own history through the less-than-perfect David, Father Gregory wants to demonstrate God at work in these far-from-ideal lives and situations.

In one of his stories, he writes about teaching a class in a prison. The class is on American short fiction, and in a conversation about Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the students, all inmates, discuss the character of the grandmother, interchangeably using the terms sympathy, empathy, and compassion. So, in teaching mode, Father Gregory asks his students to define these terms. Here is his description of their conversation:

“Well, sympathy,” one begins, “is when your homie’s mom dies and you go up to him and say, ‘’Spensa—sorry to hear ’bout your moms.’”

Just as quickly, there is a volunteer to define empathy.

“Yeah, well, empathy is when your homie’s mom dies and you say, ‘’Spensa, ’bout your moms. Sabes qué, my moms died six months ago. I feel ya, dog.’”

“Excellent,” I say. “Now, what’s compassion?”

No takers.

The class collectively squirms and stares at their state-issue boots. . . .

Their silence is quite sustained. Finally, an old-timer, down twenty-five years, tentatively raises his finger. I call on him.

“Well, now,” he says, all eyes on him, shaking his head, “Compassion—that’s sumthin’ altogether different.”

He ponders what he’ll say next.

“Cause,” he adds humbly, “That’s what Jesus did. I mean compassion . . . is . . . God.” (Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, pp. 61–62)

Compassion is God. Father Gregory’s stories, all of them, turn out to be meditations on this point. “If we long to be in the world who God is,” he writes, “then, somehow our compassion has to find its way to vastness” (p. 66). Where the kids he loves are killing other kids he loves, he has come to recognize that only compassion has a public chance. Only compassion is vast enough to bridge the gulf between enemies, between members of rival gangs. Only compassion is expansive enough to transcend private, personal passions. In contrast to sympathy and empathy, only compassion enables people to imagine and care about lives that are nothing like their own or that might even be at cross-purposes with their own.

In a book written almost thirty years ago, Habits of the Heart, a group of American sociologists conducted a five-year study of American communities to gain insight into what “habits of the heart” are cultivated by American institutions and traditions that enable its citizens to care beyond their individual lives and private spheres and commit themselves to the larger American public, a public that consists of people who may even be opponents of one another. To understand the habits of the heart that make up the character of Americans, these sociologists recognized that they needed to study the role of religious institutions in America. What they found, however, was that religion in America was on a trajectory of becoming increasingly privatized. By that they meant that most Americans have increasingly come to see religion as something private and individual and have a hard time knowing what role, if any, religion should take in the public sphere.

As long as we believe that God is at work in the world, in our nation, and in our cities, and not just in our individual lives, the church must have a public role to play. Among other things, the church’s public role is to make known the vastness of God’s compassion. Churches can be in the news, and preachers can use the pulpit as a megaphone to be heard by the public, but if the words that we hear do not stem from compassion and challenge us to transcend our own private interests and purposes, the message of the church will not have true public power.