Buckle in, y'all -- long and serious post ahead.

Several things have come together in the last few days. I ran across an article talking about how Bono is promoting the One Campaign (known in England as "Making Poverty History") in U2 Concerts. The One Campaign, in their own words, is "not asking for your money, [but] asking for your voice." So I went to their website (www.one.org) and watched the video and added my name to their cause of compassion and social justice, and I encourage you to do the same. Still, as I was typing my information on the web form, I noticed skepticism and not a small sense of futility lurking around the corners of my heart. A question was starting to form in me.

Then yesterday as I was driving to Mora, I listened to a global call-in on NPR talking about the dynamics of globalization. I heard a man from India arguing that economic conditions are getting better overall because even most households in the slums now have TVs and people are considering a second car at the same point in their careers when their parents were scraping for a first. Again that skepticsm rose up and the question became a little clearer. I started wondering if Marx didn't have it backwards -- if materialism and not religion is REALLY the opiate of the masses. {NOTE: Reader, please know that I am PAINFULLY aware that I am typing this on one of my two Apple computers and posting it to a blog linked to my list of 800+ books. Know that I know that if materialism is the opiate of the masses, then I'm a total crack-head.} Is it possible for a person weighing considerations of hybrid vs. SUV to see the neglected child two blocks down? To feel the lesions of an AIDS victim as if they were growing on his/her own skin?

The question boils down to this: what good is compassion anyway? Reaching out to another person may mitigate their suffering for a while, but is a localized, momentary flash of relief even noticeable? Aren't our only true options either numbness or despair?

While I couldn't articulate it that clearly, the sense of the question gnawed at me all night. I didn't sleep well. It was as if my lofted bed was about to tip over, and I was headed for a fall. Then, this morning, I continued reading Brueggeman and hit this land mine of the soul. It's long, but please, read carefully.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unnatural condition for humanness. In the arrangement of "lawfulness" in Jesus' time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion... Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of his social context. Empires live by numbness... Governments and societies go to great lengths to keep the numbness intact. Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual. Thus compassion that might be seen simply as a generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies the produce the hurt. Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it... Thus Jesus embodies the hurt that the marginal ones know by taking it into his own person and his own history. Their hurt came from being declared outside the realm of the normal, and Jesus engages with them in a situation of abnormality.

My first reaction to that is an immediate drop to my spiritual knees -- a teary, heartfelt cry from every cell in my body, "HALLELUJAH! My Lord and my God!" That last bit strikes home with me in part because I've never felt "normal," and every life-changing encounter with Jesus has been in the context of my abnormality. I get that. I'm grateful for it. I am struck dumb with amazement at the thought that the one undefeatable force against the spirit of this world is compassion -- not just in a spiritual and individual sense, but potentially in the political and socioeconomic realms as well.

But then comes the sense that I can't do it. That all my comparative material wealth belies my utter poverty in the emotional, mental, and spiritual resources to feel and hold and grieve for the hurts of even my friends, much less the world. When Dan Rather used to list three or four servicemen killed abroad as a segue to commercial breaks (ponder the irony) on the CBS Evening News, I would get teary. And I'm not sure God is calling me to be completely non-functional with grief for the world for an extended period of time. Maybe He is, but then He also has me back in Research Writing on the 31st.

Lord, deepen my compassion. Strengthen my ability to hold the tensions and seek the Answer, not just answers. Only in You is there freedom and life. Help me live in Kingdom, not Empire. Tell Your story in me, and teach me how to live it, speak it, breathe it.

There it is, y'all. I told you it would be long.