In compassion, a sense of solidarity develops; your suffering becomes my suffering. A few people have been said to have empathic gifts, where they can actually enter into part of another's suffering or pain, and bear with them the part of it they can reach. (It probably feels as much like a curse as it does a gift.) But no one needs such a gift to have compassion. You only need enough love in you to want someone's suffering to end or at least become more bearable.
There are some related words. Sympathy is being sad about others' sadness. Commiseration is when that sorrow is expressed to the saddened ones. Pity leads you to want to help them if you could. Compassion goes one step further. It is more than a mere desire to help; it creates a determination, a decision to actually help, even if only in some small way. Compassion puts something of yourself on the line: perhaps your power over someone, or your time, or wealth, or effort, or healing skills. When it's strong, compassion overrides angry or vengeful desires. Compassion differs from mercy in that compassion is about an emotional connection that moves you toward action, while mercy is about the action itself. Compassion can lead to mercy. Jesus' compassion led him to take actions for the woman caught in adultery, the crowds which came for healing and teaching, and the woman at the well. God's compassion is like that of a father for his sons.
"Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
----- Henri Nouwen
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