It is this inner solidarity which prevents self-righteousness and makes compassion possible. Thomas Merton, the monk, expresses this well when he writes:
Once God has called you to solitude, everything you touch leads you further into solitude. Everything that affects you builds you into a hermit, as long as you do not insist on doing the work yourself and building your own kind of hermitage. What is my new desert? The name of it is compassion. There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid and so fruitful as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like the lily. It shall become a pool, it shall bud forth and blossom and rejoice with joy. It is in the desert of compassion that the thirsty land turns into springs of water, that the poor possess all things.
The paradox of Merton’s life indeed is that his withdrawal from the world brought him into closer contact with it. The more he was able to convert his restless loneliness into a solitude of heart, the more he could discover the pains of his world in his own inner center and respond to them. His compassionate solidarity with the human struggle made him a spokesman for many who, although lacking his talent for writing, shared his solitude. How much Merton became aware of his responsibilities in solitude becomes clear when he writes:
That I should have been born in 1915, that I should be the contemporary of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Viet Nam and the Watts riots are things about which I was not first consulted. Yet they are also events in which, whether I like it or not, I am deeply and personally involved.
And not without a touch of sarcasm he adds:
. . . it has become transparently obvious that mere automatic “rejection of the world” and “contempt for the world” is in fact not a choice but the evasion of a choice. The man who pretends that he can turn his back on Auschwitz, or Viet Nam and act as if they were not there is simply bluffing. I think that this is getting to be generally admitted, even by monks.
Compassion born in solitude makes us very much aware of our own historicity. We are not called to respond to generalities but to the concrete facts with which we are confronted day after day. A compassionate man can no longer look at these manifestations of evil and death as disturbing interruptions of his life plan but rather has to confront them as an opportunity for the conversion of himself and his fellow human beings. Every time in history that men and women have been able to respond to the events of their world as an occasion to change their hearts, an inexhaustible source of generosity and new life has been opened, offering hope far beyond the limits of human prediction.
~Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: the Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
