This reflection continues my series inspired by Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Discovering the Mind of Christ, Part 2, especially her commentary on Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence. We have been circling around the same basic question from several directions: what changes when consciousness is no longer completely identified with whatever happens to be passing through it? Cynthia has taken us from watching the boats on the river, to catching the ego in the act, to relaxing our grip on the watcher itself. In this part of the discussion, however, she turns toward something I found much harder to accept.
She says that simply being can be an act of compassion.
That sounds lovely until you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
Most of us have been trained to believe compassion is something you do. You feed someone, visit someone, advocate for someone, fix something, donate something, volunteer somewhere. Christianity in particular has an enormous vocabulary of service. “What are we doing about it?” is practically a sacramental question.
And then Cynthia starts talking about Thomas Merton standing on a street corner and suddenly seeing the people around him differently.
Merton did not start a program.
He did not organize a committee.
He saw.
And Cynthia insists that something happened in the world because he saw.
When Everybody Started Shining
The Merton experience she is referring to is one of the best-known moments of his life. He was standing in the middle of an ordinary city, surrounded by ordinary people, when the separation he normally experienced between himself and everyone else suddenly gave way. For a moment, he saw the people around him as radiant, as if some hidden divine beauty had become visible through them.
What interests Cynthia is not merely that Merton had a mystical experience. Mystics have been having impressive experiences for a long time, and the ego is perfectly capable of adding those to its collection.
What matters is what happened to the boundary.
The people around him were no longer objects in Merton’s consciousness. They were no longer strangers, categories, problems, sinners, respectable citizens, irritating pedestrians, or potential recipients of his compassion. Something opened in him that allowed him simply to see them.
And according to Cynthia, that opening itself mattered.
She makes the startling claim that Merton’s heart opening in that moment “changed something in the universe,” even though he did not immediately run off to build homeless shelters in Louisville. Her point is not that homeless shelters are unnecessary. It is that we have become so fixated on visible action that we barely believe anything has happened unless we can photograph the result.
I had to sit with that one.
There is a part of me that wants compassion to leave receipts.
The Problem With Being Useful
Cynthia had already been dismantling our usual ideas about compassion earlier in the discussion. One of the students asks the obvious question: if detachment means letting go of identification, what keeps us from becoming indifferent? If I stop being emotionally entangled with everybody’s suffering, why wouldn’t I just stop caring?
Her answer is almost the reverse of what we expect.
Identification does not create pure compassion. Very often it contaminates it.
We see someone suffering and immediately insert ourselves into the situation. We need to fix it. We need to become the helper. We need the problem resolved partly because their distress is making us uncomfortable. We rush in too soon, do work that may not need doing, and sometimes prevent another person from undergoing the struggle through which their own strength might emerge.
Cynthia is particularly unsentimental about Christian helping. Much of it, she says, contains hidden agendas: helping in order to be a helper, helping to feel important, helping to reinforce the comforting distinction between those of us who have something and those unfortunate people to whom we graciously give it.
That stings because it is not entirely wrong.
The ego likes being useful.
Being useful gives it a very respectable reason to remain at the center of the story.
“He Just Beed”
Then Cynthia tells a tiny story about Brother Roger of Taizé.
She remembers encountering him while carrying the wounds of her own childhood. He did not sit her down and try to repair her. He did not analyze the damage or launch a pastoral intervention.
He looked at her.
He asked her name.
That was basically it.
And Cynthia, in one of those wonderful phrases that would make an English teacher reach for a red pen, says:
“He just beed.”
I love that.
Because whatever “beed” means grammatically, I know exactly what she means spiritually.
There are people whose presence does something to a room. They are not performing serenity. They are not trying to transmit wisdom. They are simply so little occupied with protecting and projecting themselves that there is room for someone else to exist in their presence.
You leave them feeling somehow more yourself.
Cynthia calls this an “energetic authenticity” that can be healing. She argues that we constantly short-circuit this level of being because we are in such a hurry to do something. We do not trust that presence has any power of its own.
I suspect that is because doing is easier to measure.
Being is annoyingly difficult to put on a résumé.
Mercy Before Management
Cynthia uses the Sufi word mercy for what another teacher calls “compassion absolute.”
The idea is not that we become passive. It is that as identification loosens, action can arise without so much of the little “I” wrapped around it.
I should do this.
I need to fix that.
What will happen if I do nothing?
What kind of person would I be if I walked away?
What will they think of me?
Strip enough of that away and Cynthia says something else begins to appear: a direct connection between the need and the response. Sometimes you move. Sometimes you wait. Sometimes you speak. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is stop interfering.
The image she uses is ripe fruit falling from a tree. The fruit does not hold a committee meeting about whether this is the morally appropriate moment to fall. When the conditions are right, it falls.
That is a very different picture of the spiritual life from the anxious moral bookkeeping many of us inherited.
It also explains why contemplation matters outside the meditation room.
Meditation is not teaching us to become excellent sitters. It is gradually loosening all the places where our reactions, fears, identities, and agendas block the movement of mercy.
Changing the World Without Taking Credit
One of Cynthia’s teachers insisted that no conscious awakening is ever wasted.
She gives an almost absurdly small example. You are sitting in traffic about to lose your mind. Something in you remembers. You come back to yourself. Maybe you feel the steering wheel in your hands or the breath in your body. The rage loosens by half an inch.
Nobody applauds.
The traffic does not clear.
There is no measurable social impact.
And yet Cynthia says something has changed.
Not enormously, but absolutely.
I find myself believing this more than I once would have. We already know that unconsciousness spreads from person to person. One angry person can poison a room. Anxiety is contagious. Fear jumps nervous systems with astonishing efficiency. We have no trouble believing that human beings affect one another when the thing being transmitted is misery.
Why would presence be the only thing that stops at the skin?
Perhaps Merton’s moment on the street matters precisely because, for one instant, another human being stopped dividing the world into himself and everybody else.
Nobody needed to know.
Nobody needed to thank him.
Nobody even needed to notice.
His heart opened.
And mercy had one less obstruction in the world.
That may be what Cynthia means when she says the deepest work is done at the level of being rather than doing. It is not an excuse to avoid action. If anything, it removes one of our favorite excuses for frantic action: the need to prove that we care.
The work is quieter than that.
We make enough room inside ourselves for mercy to move without constantly asking whether it makes us look compassionate.
Sometimes mercy will build the shelter.
Sometimes mercy will march.
Sometimes mercy will bring the meal, write the check, make the phone call, or sit beside the hospital bed.
And sometimes mercy will simply look at another human being and finally see them.
Merton stood on a street corner and, for a moment, everybody shone.
Perhaps they had been shining all along.
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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski
Sometimes what you write just makes me cry. Thank you. These are needed tears. I see myself so much in this. I am one who just wants to DO something -anything- to take hurt away. How much of that is selfish? I don’t know but I suspect a good portion is all about me!! I don’t want to feel their pain or my helplessness? I’ve been painfully aware of this in me long before it became very real and close when my husband suffered a spinal stroke and was confined to a wheelchair for the last few years of his life. It hurt to see him that way and not be able to “fix” anything. I learned a lot about myself for those three years and I was definitely not the best version of myself at times. How I wish that I had just been present with him instead of trying to be a cheerleader and fixer. Your writing is healing and helpful so thank you, thank you 🙏
‘Just being’ is not a passive state. It is a coherent state. The organism resting in its own baseline frequency without the need to perform, protect, or prove.
Merton understood this. The mercy he speaks of is not something we give. It is something we become when we stop trying to control the field.
I have seen this in my own body and in my work with clients: the most profound shifts often occur not in the doing, but in the quiet allowing.