One can have awareness of and sympathy for another’s suffering without
concluding that it is one’s God-given right to step into that person’s life and rearrange it according to our own standards. judgments and desires.
It is not compassionate to substitute one’s own will for the free will of another. Unless the person is a child too young to understand or mentally incompetent to make decisions at all, it is egotistical in the extreme to believe that our decisions are better for hir than hir own. Contrary to your premise, allowing someone to do as sie will does not mean failing to notice sie is in distress and to *offer* help and advice. It means allowing the person to take from that help and advice what sie chooses to take, and it means coping with the fact that we might not have all hir answers.
We cannot know, from within our own limited perspective, what another person needs to learn or experience for hir own higher good. What may appear to be very bad to us may in fact be very good for the other person, for reasons we cannot fathom.
It is not compassionate to cripple someone by making hir believe sie is
incapable of doing something for hirself and only with our help will sie succeed. Far too often, I’ve seen people claiming to “serve” someone, when, in fact, what they are really serving is their own self-importance at the expense of the other’s self-esteem. Again, this doesn’t mean that one cannot or should not *offer* a word of encouragement or a hand up. It means that any “service” should be offered in a way that empowers the person one would help, not in a way that perpetuates hir sense of helplessness, failure and incompetence. It means allowing the person to refuse our help, regardless of
how foolish we think that refusal may be. Maybe the person needs to learn how to do it all by hirself, without any help from anyone. Maybe just the offer of help is enough to help hir succeed. Maybe a failure is a doorway to a whole new world of wonderful possibilities. Regardless, it’s hir choice to be served by us or not.
To deny another person the right to live according to hir own free will, to find hir own Truth, or to learn what sie has come here to learn because we believe OUR way is better, wiser, more morally uplifted — THAT is “reprehensible in the extreme.”
Des’tai
K’Llayna