Reclaiming Compassion: A Christmas Meditation (applicable to all Conservative Americans)

The Heritage Foundation ^ | 12/10/1989 | Marvin Olasky

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If we adopt the compassion of time rather than that of cash, we are not trying to do the same thing as liberals, only a bit more cheaply. Instead, we must ask of every idea that calls itself compassionate, "Does it make great demands on men (and women) to give themselves to their brethren?" Are we offering not coerced silver, but our lives? If we talk of crisis pregnancies, are we actually willing to provide a home to a pregnant young woman? If we talk of abandoned children, are we actually willing to adopt a child? We need to ask questions like that, and pray for the grace to answer. them rightly. At the Heart of Faith. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, a time when God came to earth to teach, to suffer, and to save by suffering. A generation ago, Whittaker Chambers wrote that "suffering is at the heart of every living faith. That is why a man can scarcely call himself a Christian for whom the Crucifixion is not a daily suffering." Chambers knew that Christianity is based in suffering - and I would add, suffering with - but he recognized that the meaning of the faith "has been bluffed as Christianity, in common with the voices of a new age, seeks new escapes from the problem of suffering .... Nothing is more characteristic of this age than its obsession with an avoidance of suffering." Are we in America, and conservatives especially, serious people? Frankly, I do not always know whether I am. I do not know whether you are. I hope we are. I pray that we are. But I do not know. I do not know, but finding out is the challenge of the 1990s for the conservative movement, I believe...