In the book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
struggles to find the word that defines her.
She travels around the world, to Italy, India, and Indonesia, in search
of her identity. After spending several
months in each of these places, she finds a word to encompass it. In India the word is “devotion;” in New York
the word is “achieve.” This word, she comments, is essentially the
heartbeat of the city. It is the
underlying identity of all that is going on inside. At one point, Liz is questioned as to what
her personal word is.
After reading
this, I began to contemplate my own “word.”
If someone were to ask me what underlying part of my identity to I cling
to most, what would my response be?
Would I want it to be “achieve”? Maybe “pleasure”? Perhaps “joy”? As wonderful as those things are, I cannot
say that they are at my core. I
ultimately want to achieve great things and I do work at having joy deep inside
me, but the true identity that I feel resides within my personality is “compassion.” It’s the trait that sometimes I want to repel
and sometimes I want to embrace more deeply, but I feel it is always a part of
me.
Frederick
Buechner describes compassion as, “Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for
feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the
knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until
there is peace and joy finally for you too.“ Mother Teresa was a master of this. It often appears to me as a curse, a huge burden of
the world. The danger is that worry overcomes
me because I try and take the burden all on my own. This word, my word, “compassion” is a
constant reminder to me that we are in a hurting world. That people are in constant turmoil and
struggle. It is a reminder that God
cares about all of those people and so should I.
When I say that
my word is “compassion,” I don’t mean that I have mastered this virtue. I simply mean that it is the word I most
often find God whispering into my heart.
Perhaps it is the virtue I am farthest from mastering so God must
constantly remind me of it. My dream,
however, is to be a person whom God will call compassionate.
So what’s your
word?
