Kristen Tennant on “Religion without stories…” (the comments are good too) It follows news reports on a study that suggests highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than they are from dogma. In the comments on this posting someone has done some helpful sleuthing on the report to check out some of what the actual report says as contrasted with the newsy write-ups. It’s an interesting subject.

Doctrine and Compassion

For all of my professional career I’ve had a visible position as a provider of emergency aid (3rd world missionary, pastor in an economically struggling community) and I was raised by a father who did this all of his life. Providing emergency assistance has been part of my life all of my life. What have I noticed? People who do this for a living, or have it as an inescapable aspect of their life very quickly develop “doctrine” with respect to their generosity. The number of requests (and their position making them available in an inordinate number of requests, often far beyond what they are able to respond to) creates in them a more systematic approach to the relationships. There are down sides to this too.

What often happens to people in this situation is that they learn to temper the compassionate impulse. Talk to workers in psych unites, nurses with the elderly. We get conditioned to things, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. This give us an insight into the emergence of “doctrine”, the importance of good doctrine (don’t abuse the weak) and the reason for indoctrination (not really a bad word if the doctrine is good). We have in our anti-institutional culture maligned the innocent word “doctrine”. Doctrine is simply a considered set of beliefs or best practices in approaching a relationship, a context, or a body of knowledge.

Generally speaking people who participate in religious organizations probably have far more exposure to philanthropic asks. Answer the phone or take in the mail at a church. Every day requests come from all over looking for mostly cash assistance. Sometimes from individuals (power bills, rent, food, gas, bus fare) other charitable organizations, missionaries and ministries of all stripes. We are a church of less than 100 people but an amazing number of people give out our number to people in need of help because word travels that we do help people.

How does this impact the connection between story and compassion and doctrine? We hear a lot of sad stories, sometimes we believe them, sometimes we don’t. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but we’ve learned to curb our emotional impulse of compassion and instead developed doctrines surrounding when to help, how to help, and when to say “no”.

A book like “When Helping Hurts” is probably an exercise in doctrine with respect to training our filters for experiential compassion.

Mirroring, Motivation and Generosity

The relationship between narrative, mirroring and emotions is also an interesting one. I’m working on Paul’s sermon in Acts 13 to Pisidian Antioch in which he essentially tells the story of Israel now with Jesus in it to the Synagogue. You’ll find this is a common sermon technique in Acts, see Peter in Acts 2. Emotions are the way we become aware of our subconscious construals of this world. Stories are so powerful because they construct these construals below our conscious level.

Mirroring happens because we are unable to know our selves apart from a world through which we mirror our selves. We both attempt to discover and construct our identities through this process of mirroring. Add to mirroring our propensity to project.

Now we see an abandoned child. What is going on in our hearts? Are we projecting fears of abandonment onto that child and are therefore acted to move to help that child? Are we attempting through that child to see ourselves (mirroring) as generous and compassion or to construct an identity with these elements because this is the kind of person we’d like to be?

We might say “what does it matter as long as the child is helped.”

OK, but this brings us further into the reason why Americans are horrified when children that look like our own are suffering, while many others with less visibility or less connectability suffer all the time and we do little or nothing about it. This gets us into reasons why compassion is often short lived (name the last three fashionable emergency causes we saw pass through twitter) and how often the short bursts of compassion sometimes do more harm than good. Are we really compassionate or are we using an occasion to really simply construct a narrative about ourselves. Do we really love the other?

Here doctrine comes in again because “love your enemy” is the most unnatural thing we can imagine. We have no natural compassion for our enemy. By definition we are acting or merely wishing for their harm.

Love is always more difficulty, challenging and costly than we care to imagine.