Compassion, Love, Humor and Light

The other night I attended a lecture given by Karen Armstrong, unequivocally my favorite author. She is brilliant, a noted scholar, and yet also so warm and accessible - I would like to have dinner with her. I won't summarize her fascinating lecture - I'll cover many of her core tenets in upcoming posts. (For a glimpse of her tenets and style, see this TED video.)

What I want to do in this post is recount a few tidbits from her post-lecture Q&A. Someone had asked her about her interfaith initiatives, and she delightfully recalled that she'd recently attended a conference in, of all places, Idaho, in which the Dalai Lama was present. A man stood up and asked the Dalia Lama, quite seriously and with grave intent, what he thought about "homosexuality" (imagine this pronounced by an old woman with a thick British accent). The Dalai Lama paused a moment, beamed a smile, and said simply, "There is no harm in it." Period. Next question. Sometimes it's more HOW we say something, coupled with what we DO NOT say, that relays meaning.

Later, she remarked that she'd attended another conference in which both the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu had participated. She was struck by how similar the two men are in some ways; both emitted an indescribably joyous light. When they were together, the laughter and lightness were pronounced. "They were like children," she remarked. These two old men, from wildly differently backgrounds and faith traditions, both channeling God, were like the little children.



So perhaps the manifestation of compassion and love is an ineffable lightness and an inclination to see humor as a soothing reflection of God's Light and a necessary companion of seriousness and profundity.