December 2001

Innovation Tips

…ideas to help you foster collaborative innovation

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Christmas Compassion

This is the sentimental and memorable season of Christmas, when one of the major religions of the world, Christianity, celebrates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. In the United States, the Christmas sentiment is nearly pervasive. It is a time of good cheer, happy memories and warm family ties. The streets, shops, homes and even the air seem enchanted with the spirit of Christmas.

This year, the year of the heart-wrenching 9/11 crisis, it may be especially helpful to remember the essential qualities of the birth that is being celebrated, for the essential qualities are those that engender understanding, dialogue, forgiveness and compassion among diverse people. Those are the same essential qualities that enable the full collective potential of groups to find expression.

The birth of the Jesus of Nazareth and his religious life constitute the most exalted expression of compassion ever born into our world. It is so exalted, in fact, that most of us find it difficult to even come close to that high ideal in our daily lives. He taught and lived a life of forgiveness, tolerance, and proactive and unselfish compassion. Few have ever really practiced religion as he lived it. Fewer still are the groups that have fully embraced his compassionate religion of faith as a way of life.

Yet his approach to life is at the heart of how groups can live and work cooperatively together, in any setting. We are so prone to judgment and self-righteous condemnation; demonizing another person or group, gossiping, holding grudges, looking after our own selfish interests at the expense of others—these are all the easy ways out. They require little effort. Just as it took comparatively little effort to destroy the World Trade Center Towers and the thousands of people in them—compared to the effort that went into building those towers and developing those lives—so is it easier to judge and condemn than to build relationships and community.

But the compassionate effort required to build relationships, to seek first to understand, to take the log out of our own eyes rather than to remove the splinter from the eyes of others, to carry someone’s figurative pack for a second mile, to turn a cheek that has been struck and respond proactively—this is the effort that is at the heart of the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the life of compassion that was born 2000 years ago.

This is also the effort that is at the heart of developing responsive and collaborative groups of people with diverse views, talents, and personal aspirations. This effort is more difficult than selfish aggrandizement, but also more exalted. Like the Christmas season, it, too, fills the air.

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