Chaplain's Corner

You may have heard the phrase “failure to cope” used of a person who is in the hospital. The phrase may have been made in reference to your mom or dad. It is a descriptive phrase for a person’s inability to manage the simple activities of living: bathing, dressing, feeding ourselves, organizing our day.

There are times when just navigating the simple activities of life becomes overwhelming and coping becomes impossible. “Cope” is an interesting word. Dictionary.com defines the word as follows “to face and deal with responsibilities, problems, or difficulties, … successfully or in a calm or adequate manner”.

Coping is not the easiest thing in the world to do and as I reflect on my own life I have coped sometimes better and sometimes worse than I would have liked. Many times I have not been able to describe my coping as adequate or calm. I know many people who find “coping” a serious challenge. Our communities have many folks who struggle to cope; sadly, most of the time those of us who cope well have little compassion for those who struggle or fail to cope. We seem to move almost immediately to judgment.

I wonder why judgment is so often our instinctive response to another’s struggle to cope as opposed to compassion. Could it be that judgment relieves us of responsibility while compassion calls us to responsibility? To judge the one who is coping poorly allows us to stand back, label the other irresponsible, lazy or worse and excuse ourselves of any responsibility. This is by far the easiest route to go. We can make the judgment quickly, excuse ourselves of responsibility just as quickly and move on.

But judgment is relationally deadly. It is robs and kills and destroys relationship from others. In this regard, please excuse me if you must, judgment the devil’s work and we are too often his mercenaries. (John 10:10a)  Judgment is the foundation of our prejudices. A prejudice is simply a pre-judgment, a judgment made with no relationship, with no knowledge or experience with an individual or group.

When we encounter people in our community that are not coping: some frail elderly folks, children and teenagers, homeless folks, people trying as best they can to wrestle down mental illness; we look at what is apparent and often draw conclusions that are unfair, unkind, and lacking in compassion. Face it, many of us just don’t want to be bothered to move towards another to care, we simply want to dismiss the other and move on.

But there is something within us that creates feelings of guilt when we do this. Unfortunately guilt is a very poor motivator, but the existence of those “O, I shouldn’t have done that” feelings do pop up within us. Although compassion is a core Christian responsibility, Christians don’t own it. A few years back Karen Armstrong, a British author who works in the area of comparative religions, wrote the Charter for Compassion to encourage people to make a commitment to stop the judgment that alienates us from others and chose compassion which draws us into the lives of others with the intent to care.

There are so many around us that are struggling to cope, others who are just plain failing to cope. Many have little or no support, many have no human being that looks upon them with compassion and moves into their lives to encourage, support, mentor and empower them to find and learn how to cope. But we can change that. Please take two minutes and write down the names of the people in your life that are struggling or failing to cope, then Read Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion and chose compassion over judgment. You can find the charter at charterforcompassion.org/the-charter.