Building Compassion

What the world needs now…is compassion. We all need the ability to see every other person as worthy of love, as precious.

I personally know adults (and so do you) who seem to have no compassion for any other person. They mock, they disparage, they criticize. They never build up, find common ground, or seek to know more. These compassionless people hurt the world.

Compassion is a muscle we are capable of flexing, and some have built it up more than others. But we can all get better.

One of the gifts of singing in the choir is the ability to flex our compassion. We interact with fellow singers and learn to love them. We meet the composer across centuries, cultures, religions. We learn to express emotions to an audience and practice forgiving others’ mistakes (and accepting forgiveness for our own).

Choir builds compassion; it fuels connection and unity. I do not think it’s a panacea for all our many problems, but it would be a great start.

People who makes music together
Cannot be enemies,
At least while the music lasts.

-Paul Hindemith