Ingrid Mattson – The HEART of COMPASSION 2017 Festival of Faiths
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Good afternoon and greetings
of peace. Bismillahirahmanarrahim,
in the name of God, the compassionate, the
most merciful.
I'm not saying that just for today. We
always begin with those those words as Muslims.
Apologies for being behind this big podium. I
wore yellow so you can still find me,
see me where I am.
My beloved daughter returned to
our creator
recently.
And so as many of you know that
when you're in mourning, a big part of
your mind is so preoccupied with that loss.
So these days so today, I said, you
know what? I'm gonna rely
on on a podium and a few cards
just to help remind me in case I
start to I love to to be with
her
and and think of her, but I need
to be here with you. So out of
compassion for myself,
and I know you'll grant me that, I'm
giving myself
these supports,
and we all need some supports at different
times.
At the end of
kindergarten
in Canada, where I grew up,
we
didn't start school till we were 5 years
old.
I grew up in a family of 7
children
between whom there was a 10 year age
difference. So
between the oldest and the youngest,
there was only 10 years.
I was the 6th child.
So you can imagine in that situation, even
with wonderful parents
and other family members,
I sometimes felt that I didn't quite get
the attention
that I wanted or I deserved.
So at the end of kindergarten,
on the last day, the teacher got up
at the front of the classroom and said,
I'm going to announce who is the girl
of the year and who is the boy
of the year.
And I won
girl of the year.
And I was given this large,
fragrant,
white gardenia. It was just beautiful,
just full
of this beautiful fragrance
and lovely and soft to the touch.
And she gave it to me and I
held it, and I felt very, you know,
very special, really.
And after
that, I walked outside with the rest of
the class and I was standing there
feeling happy, holding this flower
when a classmate
who I will,
call for the purposes
of,
protecting her identity, I'll call her today, Didi.
Didi came up,
she grabbed the flower,
She threw it on the ground. She stamped
on it and said,
what makes you so special?
And
I was a little bit afraid. I wasn't
sure if the violence was also gonna be
transferred to me.
And I was sad looking at my lovely
flower
squished and
stomped on on the ground.
But behind all of that,
as I looked at her face, there was
a much stronger and more lasting emotion that
I can feel until today. I'm
53. It was a long time ago.
And that was a deep sense of compassion
for
her.
I could see the pain on her
angry little
face. She was so small and skinny.
And I realized that in her words, when
she said, what makes you so special? What
she was saying is,
why am I not special?
Why didn't anyone see that I'm special too?
Where does this
compassion come from?
The compassion that overrode
my
sadness,
my being upset
at the loss of the flower,
the fear that maybe she would become violent
with me. I
was only a child.
As a Muslim, reflecting upon it over the
last many
years and learning that
compassion, in fact, is
what my teacher, Doctor. Omar Abdullah, calls the
stamp
of creation.
Other than the personal name Allah, which means
the God in Arabic,
the next
name,
personal name of God is Adar Rahman,
the compassionate.
Sometimes people translate it as the merciful and
then the the word that's paired with it,
Al Raheem, they translate as compassionate.
But I think I think Rahman really is
compassion and both words
come from the root Rahem, which is womb.
The womb by which
our mothers gave birth to us.
So Rahma,
compassion
is our home.
That is where we are born.
And as Muslims, we believe that that our
souls come into being first in the presence
of Ar Rahman, of the compassionate
before we are embodied.
And so it is in compassion
that we feel most at home
and we feel most whole. We feel like
we are where we should be.
Think of so many people when they're near
their deaths, even if they're very very old,
they call out for their mother.
People who work with the dying know that,
or they start talking a lot. You can
tell that someone might be close to death
as they're talking a lot about their mother.
So it is mother is that metaphor
for that original first
primordial place
in which we're born.
So if that's our home,
how do we wander away from home? How
do we get lost from that? How do
we get separated from that?
If I go back to Didi and I
think she too was a child,
like I was a child,
What happened?
And we've heard today,
for example, about the science of attachment
and
what happens to us when we are
neglected,
when we're
not given the love and attention and care
we need, Muslims believe that God created us
with what the Quran calls fitra,
which this original
whole
disposition, a sense of wholeness,
a sense of comfort in compassion,
and also an awareness,
a general awareness
of
basic right and wrong.
With compassion comes a sense of justice, and
we think of them sometimes as opposites, but
they're two sides of the coin.
And so, honestly,
girl of the year,
it was unjust.
It was absurd.
I mean,
how to do that to all those children?
What what about it, you know, what made
me girl of the year? Perhaps
my parents
were more rigorous with good manners.
Maybe it's just because
I was born an introvert, so I wasn't
the person who was naturally running around the
room and had all this extra energy,
you know,
it wasn't I didn't do anything really to
deserve it. And it was an act of
injustice
to her, certainly, she felt it.
So
when we've had our fitra, our sense of
wholeness, our sense of comfort in this compassionate
whole being,
when it's been covered up,
and we've had to,
you know, follow a different path because if
if you were raised by criminals
and you're told this is the way,
you know, to survive and you have to
do it or I'll hit you,
and you know it's wrong, and then you
have
to rationalize it to yourself, and you get
in the habit of rationalization, and you feel
broken, you don't feel right.
So we all in smaller and larger parts
go away from it, but how do we
return to it? And this is what I
find really beautiful about our teachings is that
it's always there waiting to be uncovered.
It's always there as our home to return
that
state. Now there are many kinds of people
in the world, and
if there are many kinds of people, introverts
and extroverts
and scientifically minded and creative creatively minded,
if compassion indeed
is the stamp of creation,
then there must be many different ways to
get back to it.
And so
exercising the intellect,
performing good deeds,
learning social norms and manners,
examining our conscience, cleaning and polishing our heart
of anger, envy, spite, and resentment,
and holding onto faith
that
everyone and everything is where it should be.
This is what we call
in our faith, a belief
that wherever we are is where we're supposed
to be. And that means
that even in the most difficult circumstances and
circumstances of evil,
we
can access that
original fundamental
nature of compassion.
And how many of you, I wonder,
have gone to help people?
To help a person who out of an
act of compassion, you went to help them
because you felt so sorry for them for
their situation. You felt so empathetic.
And there,
you found
that they acted so
compassionately towards you.
I've worked with refugees. I've worked with
ill people, and every time I went to
out of compassion to try to help someone,
I found them even more compassionate towards me.
Refugees
in a refugee camp
during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, who when
they found out that I
had just got married and I didn't have
any family with me and
I wasn't given any
jewelry or fancy clothes.
Refugees in a refugee camp.
Then 2 weeks later said,
we're gonna have a wedding party for you
and they threw me a party and they
sold me a dress and they gave me
gifts.
So I think it's it's us, it's the
the privileged people who have the most difficult
time really having this this purity of compassion.
We need to get back to it because,
honestly,
select
university that I went to and all of
these advantages,
yet how many of us think that we
are
self made
men,
people?
Selfishness is the big block to compassion. And
so for the intellectual person
to go through
the simple facts that we have not made
ourselves, neither our bodies nor our genetic makeup
nor did we do anything to choose our
family. This is an intellectual
exercise for those who may have a slightly
hardened
heart to look at the facts
and might be able to crack open
with that factual intellectual
exercise
a path for compassion.
For many
spiritual practices
that are embodied, I demonstrated
prayer yesterday, but things like fasting, it's
I tell you, if I didn't have to
fast once a year, I just don't know
what kind of person I would be.
I mean,
it
is a remembrance of myself. It is a
remembrance of my creator. It is also that
opportunity to truly experience thirst and hunger.
And that visceral
that visceral understanding
that can't come through
through reading or someone telling you about it.
You may be able to see it, but
to experience it so different, and that's another
path.
Muhasaba,
taking account of myself. And this is the
interior work that if I do all of
these other things,
I need to do this,
what what is called a taking of account
literally, muhasaba in Arabic, where I
regularly during my prayers add that time for
what is in my heart? Is there anger
in my heart? Is there envy in my
heart? Is there resentment
in my heart?
Because all of these can be barriers and
roadblocks to compassion.
To open it and get rid of those
barriers.
There are so many things that we can
do
to open up paths of compassion And one
of them I think
is something that we can do every day
and at all places and all times
and comes from the teachings of the prophet
Mohammed, may God's peace and blessings be upon
him.
And I think it's this,
we, especially now, we live in a society
where we are told
that there are so many things we don't
have. We live in that culture of deprivation.
Even if we have much, we feel we
don't have much.
The The prophetic teaching,
when you see someone who has more,
look to someone who has less, and it
is the looking.
And the prophet Muhammad,
when he spoke to people and we looked
at people, he looked at them full face.
He didn't have his head, you know, his
body turned ready to go out the door
and looking.
It was the full face
look at people.
And we know when we see the face
of others and we're face to face, there
is something very instinctive
that opens up within us and opens up
that path to compassion.
And all of us can do that wherever
we are.
So in conclusion,
I wanna say there are so many
avenues to explore. Sometimes people are are a
little bit nervous when they hear,
you know, words like compassion. They think, well,
I don't, you know, I don't really like
meditating or I'm not that kind of person
or they feel that they they're going to
be forced to conform to a certain way
of of into this learning.
Stamp
of creation, there are roads and avenues for
all of us. Stamp of creation,
there are roads and avenues for all of
us. And so I'm so happy to be
able to explore that together.
Thank you, doctor Matson.
That was very moving,
and,
it's special being up here right now because
there's so much
infused compassion
that I think we're not touching our chairs.
It's quite amazing up here. I don't know
if you're feeling it out there. I guess
you are.
Reflections,
comments,
reactions,
please.
Well,
thank you so much. It was really very
inspiring, and I love the the imagery
of home,
compassion, the state of compassion as being your
natural home and
kind of awakening compassion and cultivating compassion is
in some ways returning home.
So I was wondering whether you would like
to kind of flesh this out a bit
more,
and,
because there is something very beautiful about this,
because sometimes we have an idea that somehow
we need to work hard at it and
we have to kind of, you know, there's
people kind of think in terms of exertion
and effort.
But on the other hand, if it's a
matter of returning home, there's a kind of
a naturalness,
which means that we just happen to have
strayed, but if we had strayed, we also
may be able to find our way back.
And
it depends how far we've wandered
from home whether it's going to be very
difficult or not.
That's why it's really a collective effort to
try to
help
people who haven't gone that far or if
they have, I mean, if you're in
a thorny thicket of shrubs,
and you've got to
break out through them, it's going to be
difficult and
you may need someone to help
you pull them back and give you some
support.
And so,
it really depends, but I think what
I find most comforting about it is that
if it's our natural state, we never lose
hope for anyone.
We never write anyone off,
we never say
they've gone so far it's impossible
for them to get back.
Now, it may be awfully difficult
and
the kind of,
you know,
we don't expect the same for everyone.
But No one is beyond redemption. No one.
No one is.
And it may be, I mean, we may
not be able to
fulfill our
responsibility in
this life to help everyone and they may
not get the help they need, but, of
course,
we believe
that this life that we're living in now
is not the only plane of existence and
that there's still an opportunity for people to
grow beyond that. So, we never give up
hope. Thank you. So I think you've
addressed and maybe answered the question about
is compassion possible
with impartiality
in your response right now?
I think what you said is, yes, of
course.
No one is beyond redemption.
Everyone
has this home of compassion.
I mean part of it is, and I
mentioned this yesterday when I was demonstrating the
prayer, sometimes
if the source of our pain
and our loss
is other people,
it may not be possible for some people
to truly experience that compassion among other people
at a certain point,
yet we're in a creation,
we're in creation that
is
formed by compassion. And so that's why you
see, for example,
with some very hardened prisoners,
You know, they'll bring they'll bring animals and
they'll do animal therapy with them and that's
the thing
that will bring out the compassion.
There there's a there is a place for
everyone,
but
we as human beings sometimes haven't done our
job very well. So for some, it may
not be among us.
I think for most of us, it should
be and we should be able to, but
we
should find those spaces
certainly, we
have brothers and sisters in all of creation
and even if it's under a tree that
is also
given the compassionate
shade and the coolness under that.
Good.