Brave, Beautiful, and Good Things
Kate Bowler and Rainn Wilson
on a Spiritual Revolution
Duke Professor Kate Bowler is an expert in the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure, suffering and happiness. She had stage IV cancer. Then, after many years of living scan to scan, she didn’t. And since then, all she wants to do is to talk to funny and wise people about how to live with the knowledge that, well, everything happens.
In this conversation, Kate talks with three-time Emmy-nominated actor, Rainn Wilson, best known for his role as Dwight Schrute on The Office. Rainn is also an author, podcaster, and co-founder of SoulPancake— a digital media company that provides encouraging and informational content like Kid President. Meeting at the Fetzer Institute, Kate and Rainn discuss how compassion can help meet our innate human need for belonging. Rainn hopes that compassion is what we need to spark a spiritual revolution.
GETTING STARTED:
01
The Latin roots of the word compassion mean “to suffer with,” to feel the hurt of another person. How have you experienced compassion in your own life? Who came and sat with you when you were in pain? Who cried with you when your heart was broken?
02
Do you feel closer to someone when you feel their compassion? Or do you feel uncomfortable?
Watch (6 Minutes): Rainn Wilson on a Spiritual Revolution
3. Do you believe that the world is in need of a spiritual revolution? Why?
“I think that at the core of any spiritual revolution is compassion. And I talk about in Soul Boom, what would it be like to invent a compassion machine where you can go into the machine and it’s wired to your brain, it looks like an MRI machine or some like that. And in it, you’re immediately put in the circumstances of an immigrant at the border or an Afghani, you know, sheep herder or a Vietnamese fisherman trying to get by. Whatever it is, the circumstances, someone wildly different than yourself, and you enter their world and you see and feel the world exactly as they do, because that would be the ultimate way to kind of like foster compassion.”
—Rainn Wilson
4. If you entered the compassion machine, who is one person you’d want to better understand?
scripture — Colossians 3:11-14 (NIV)
Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Written by the Apostle Paul to a church that he’d never met in a town he’d never visited, the letter to the Colossians emphasizes the importance of connection. The things that used to divide the community no longer matter. Jesus started a spiritual revolution of love that unites us, and creates a family where everyone belongs. The survival of the early church depended on deep connections with Christ and community.
5. How does clothing ourselves in “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” create belonging and connection?
“Culturally, I think we struggle to understand what love is because we only have one English language word for love. And so many other languages, I hear, like Sanskrit has 19 words for love. I love the New York Knicks. And I love my wife. And I love God, and I love skateboarding videos from the 70s. But that’s not really love. Love isn’t a feeling in the chest. Love is an action, it’s only borne out in action.”
—Rainn Wilson
6. There are many definitions of love. How do we define the type of love that is a virtue?
“To go to people with different skin colors who, who speak different languages and who, maybe think about the world in a different way politically than we do to an ever-increasing kind of universality of compassion, where we drain our bank accounts and sacrifice our time, our energy, and especially our comfort. We sacrifice those bubble baths, for the good of someone else. So what does that look like?”
—Rainn Wilson
7. What keeps us from crossing the lines into sacrificial love for others?
8. The early church was starting a spiritual revolution based on love, and they faced several challenges. How does the Church today face similar challenges?
9. What could you (or your community) do to help spark a spiritual revolution in your community?
A Blessing For love, love, love
Lord, the shadowed world
is full of troubles.
So give me the good,
inconvenient work of love.
Link my life to others
so that their worries
become my own.
Give me errands I don’t want
which ease the burdens of others.
Divert me from the plans I’ve made
to zip from A to B
when you have better ideas.
Put my hands to work
with a less-grumbling heart
and let their dreams drift into my own.
You’ve given me tools to use
and ideas to fashion
that will bring me neither recognition,
nor money, nor praise.
You’ve made love such a sneaky thing.
The more we love as you do,
the less we are keeping track of it at all.
