Compassion

Students and alumni of the SFU Semester in Dialogue are among those invited to participate in the “Stories of Compassion Student and Alumni Challenge” by submitting stories of compassion to select Metro Vancouver community newspapers.

The first ten participants to successfully publish their stories of compassion in an eligible community newspaper will each receive a $100 prize and a chance to attend a lecture by Karen Armstrong. All participants will be supporting Karen Armstrong’s Compassionate Cities movement, a global effort to formally examine the role of compassion in our communities.

img http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion

Compassion is defined by Dictionary.com as “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering”. That sounds about right to me. In situation like natural disasters, we all feel so very sorry for those affected and we reach into our pockets to make donations to relief efforts to help to the best of our abilities. However, in situations where a loved one is diagnosed with cancer or a colleague loses his job or a friend is going through an ugly divorce, the lines are not so easily defined....

 Each person’s experience and reaction is as uniquely different as is our own fingerprint. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, the last thing that is needed is for someone to start telling them what they should do, how they should be thinking, what the best course of action will be and what course of treatment will be the best.

by Barbara Jacoby

With Occupy Wall Street’s focus on greed it may be worth thinking about its place in our culture. The greed of monarchs is what led to the European colonization of this hemisphere and the despoiling of its bounteous natural and human resources. That same force of greed, when channeled by the systems enshrined in the U.S. constitution and labeled capitalism, led to unprecedented technologically-based growth. We’ve all received some benefits from that growth and maybe are just now approaching its limits.

But, in a culture such as ours that has a strong underpinning of ethics derived from Hebrew and Christian traditions, greed has always been challenged.

TUCSON, AZ—A University of Arizona study published this week in the American Journal Of Sociology suggests that some adult humans may occasionally feel compassion, a trait scientists have long considered beyond the capacity of the species.

"A small percentage of the roughly 900 subjects we observed seemed at times to exhibit genuine empathy toward another person experiencing either psychological or physical pain," said the study's lead author, Dr. Benjamin Trumble, who later added that these individuals did not appear as though they were looking to gain anything from their compassionate reactions, but, to the surprise of researchers, were simply concerned about another person's well-being.

In presenting their finding that “organizations in Israel are often perceived as ineffective to respond in a humane or compassionate manner to the suffering caused by terrorism” Waldman et al. (this issue, p. 1) draw our attention to the question of how caring and compassion can be facilitated by organizations. Thus, their work is in accord with recent calls for managers and management scholars to – as summarized by the theme of the 2010 Academy of Management Meeting – “dare to care”.

That is, organizations and their leaders are increasingly asked to “focus on enabling others to create, produce, and deliver goods and services that enhance the well-being of, and generate value for, all the stakeholders involved” (Tsui, 2010); while management scholars are asked to reach a better understanding of the organizational antecedents and consequences of these processes. As Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, & Margolis (2010) state, we have to ask ourselves “how the worlds of management, organizations, and management and organization scholarship might change if themes of compassion and caring were at the forefront of thinking about organizing”.

You can call me naïve, but I believe that to save the human race and this magnificent planet we are on, compassion must be part of our daily prayer.

All our political candidates need to be sent back to compassion school. They need to take vows before they run for office that they will have compassion for we the people, for each other, for our global family, for the earth. These candidates need to become more than talk show hosts or masters of ceremonies trying to woo us for votes. We condone such terrible behavior on television -- candidates attacking each other, doing anything to win. Politicians shouldn't be allowed to act so hatefully anymore.

Covering doctrine and the lived experience of the world’s religious practitioners, Call to Compassion is a collection of stirring and passionate essays on the place of animals within the philosophical, cultural, and everyday milieus of spiritual practices both ancient and modern. From Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, through the Abrahamic traditions, to contemporary Wiccan and Native American spirituality, Call to Compassion charts the complex ways we interact with the world around us.