Our Circle Is Too Small

In the early 20th century a humble Scottish preacher by the name of Arthur John Gossip spoke the following words in a sermon:

“Dostoevsky in one place declares that the only thing that civilization has done for us is to increase our sensibility, our capacity for pain, the pain that comes from sympathy; and wishes plaintively that he were an insect, and so safe from the pangs that his human nature brings him.  And, in truth, many of us are insects, nothing more.  Your selfish man can only be hurt in his own person, and is fairly secure.  He has so small an area to guard.

But as we rise in the scale of being, this vulnerable surface becomes larger. We can be wounded now in our spouse, our children, our family, our friends.  And God’s plan seems to be that this circle of those who matter to us, and through whom we can be injured, should widen out and out, till it is co-extensive with humanity.  ‘Agonies are one of my changes of garments,’ says Whitman; ‘I do not ask the wounded person how he feels.  I myself become the wounded person.  And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.’”

How far have we risen in the scale of being—as human beings, as persons, as a society, as a nation?  How “co-extensive” is our circle of those who matter to us?  “Me First, Us First, America First” implies that we choose to live in a very small circle. We have no room left, we say.  We must guard our small area and erect walls to keep others out.  We must erase the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me…”.  Those people do not matter any more.  We have no sympathy for them.  Only we matter.

It is no longer a question of how far we have risen in the scale of being—it is now a question of how far we have fallen in the scale of being.  When only “we matter” we have no sympathy and Whitman speaks truth:  “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”