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‘Mammal’ is a Fine Start.

Up on the mountain Moses asked God to reveal to him God’s appearance. God told Moses that this would melt his face off, give or take a detail in the translating. So God announced the divine essence to Moses while helping the little man shield his eyes. The first descriptor God used as God passed?

“Compassionate.”

This word compassionate in the original Hebrew is the root word for a mother’s womb. A womb is a place where you are nurtured, protected, developed, wanted, bragged on, surrounded and cherished before you could possibly earn it. Where you are loved because you exist, not for anything like your achievements or your stance on gays or your take on whether Stegosaurs had a stall in the Ark. You are loved because Love loves you. You can’t get out of it.

It is after this Pattern we are told we’re built. We are like this, essentially.

Years ago, driving to Ohio in the predawn, my family slept and I chugged caffeine. Kristi was curled up in the passenger seat, her pillow wedged between her headrest and the window. The kids were bundled under blankets in the back. The temperature outside the van was a brisk 34°.

When I noticed my feet were numbing in the cold, I made an adjustment to my dial. We had one of those posh multi-position temperature controls that allowed the driver, the passenger and those in the back to have their own settings. I cranked mine well into the red.

A minute later, Kristi stirred. She was also cold. With one swift movement she dialed her side up several degrees. And then she returned to her fetal curl, and then immediately uncurled and adjusted the setting for the rear of the van. She coiled up a final time and went back to sleep, her and the children warm.

When I was cold I warmed myself. Stimulus and response.

When Kristi got cold, she warmed herself as well as the kids.

This difference between us is typical.

At noon on Saturday my stomach growls. I immediately think “I’m hungry, I want something to eat.” So I make myself something to eat. Stimulus and response. This is a fairly uncalibrated behavior because that’s as far as the thought and action goes. It’s love, but dialed to “ME.” There’s a ring on my finger but after over a decade and a half I still too often have the awareness of a bachelor, on an island, alone.

At noon on Saturday my wife’s stomach growls. Her first thought? “I’m hungry. It’s lunch time. I need to get the kids some food.” The wired love of self is the handy alarm bell announcing it’s time to love others. A measured sense of self. Not selfless, or others would suffer for the lack of awareness. And not wholly selfish, or the result is the same. If there’s a dial on Love, it’s best kept at, in the very least, “51% Others.” On this depend all the Law and Prophets.

We are all born with a basic, biological compassion. It’s intensity might vary, but it’s there in some measure within all of us. The mother in almost all mammalian species is able to make the interests of her offspring her own. Their suffering is her suffering. Their thriving also hers. Fathers have their version, so this isn’t any sort of man bashing. Parental love is ideally as basic as it is beautiful. But it may not qualify as necessarily inspired. For many people it’s simply a biological framework. Survival of the species. A construct.

And yet this is the first, fundamental truth God is depicted as sharing with the captain of the Exodus. Compassion. Empathy. Motherly care poured on irrespective of the child’s capacity to reciprocate. A rudimentary construct that in the very least promotes survival of the species.

To bear the image of Ahava in our limited way might be the task of taking what’s already part of our basic biological architecture and expanding it a little more each day. To include not just those we find most easy to give ourselves to, but to have our Compassion become so expansive that it begins to encircle the acquaintance, the stranger, the idiot, the ex and even our enemies, growing to love even them, the way mothers can adore their own bratty kids.

“Love properly understood is God—the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love.”

We all, even the most obnoxious among us, have the basic capacity to care for others. The easiest objects of our most fundamental compassion are those we appraise as weaker than ourselves. Perhaps this is why Jesus put forth the least of these as an easy group to give ourselves to first. It counts. It’s good. It’s in keeping with the design specs. And if we start there, and grow in our awareness of others’s hopes and needs as we have grown so accustomed to knowing and focusing on our own, we can go from biology 101 level of compassion and radiate it outward to even those who in their uncalibrated selfishness would right now do us harm.