Compassion, Truth, and Respect

Rebecca at "Rebecca Writes" has a post well worth reading on cancer and divine providence. I think a great many things said about the problem of evil (in all its various forms) that are put forward as if they showed some special sensitivity to those who suffer are, in fact, extremely condescending, and Rebecca's post makes very clear one way in which this is so. In doing so, the post also points out incidentally a key fact about hope: people get genuine hope only from something that serves as a sure foundation for it. In a case like this, this requires that everyone look at the world frankly and think things through (use their noggins, as Rebecca says). I've never faced the sort of trial Rebecca has, but in college I did a lot of volunteering; one unfortunate fact that my experiences made me aware of is that there are a lot of people who are far more interested in the feeling of being compassionate than they are in actually being compassionate. One sign of the difference is that the former are always muddying the waters, obscuring their view of the world, because the people in that group are always more interested in their own feelings (either the feeling that they are being compassionate or the feeling of superiority or morality or what-have-you that they get in feeling it) than in the truth; with people who are actually compassionate, the reverse is true. The former group have no genuine sense of respect, because their 'respect' for people in unfortunate circumstances is built entirely around what makes them feel like they are acting (or thinking, or arguing) morally; it's a sort of narcissism that real compassion eschews. So on that level I can entirely understand Rebecca's impatience and frustration with the attitudes she talks about.