Compassion fatigue. It’s usually used to describe how caregivers can become physically or emotionally exhausted when providing for another’s health needs without respite.
In my experience, the same thing can easily happen when we are that person with health needs—or even a relatively healthy person struggling through a difficult season in this fallen world. We might start out well enough when tackling a challenge, but as difficulties drag on, we can become apathetic or tired of attending to our own needs: a sort of self-compassion fatigue, if you will.
As someone who struggles with chronic illness, I am easily wearied by having to take so many supplements, prioritizing my treatments and physical therapies, or needing rest and help again. We humans, in general, get tired of trying to eat well, move well, hydrate well, rest well, and recover well. With life’s myriad demands, this weariness over our own needs pokes at the impatient parts of our hearts—which sometimes perch precariously atop hidden strongholds of hopelessness: Will things ever get easier? In the waiting, the weariness, and the hidden despair, we are quickly tempted to let care for our physical needs slide.
A Serious Temptation
I’ve come to understand this self-compassion fatigue as a real temptation—and sneaky one at that. Why?
Care of the body is directly related to care of the soul.
Now, when I speak of caring for our bodies, I’m not referring to the vain and indulgent “self-care” sometimes touted by our world, which can idolize personal comforts and desires while diminishing service to others. I’m speaking of caring for our bodies as our inherent dignity demands—for the divine temples they truly are—so we can succeed in our God-given mission.
Our bodies are holy wonders: mysteriously knit together in our mother’s womb, sustained through an often-forgotten symphony of complex systems that, for all our advancements in science and medicine, we still only narrowly understand.
Our beautiful bodies, inextricably entwined with our eternal souls, contain the Author of Life’s stamp on every cell from the moment of conception—as well as the imprint of God’s character accompanied by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit from the moment of our baptism. We are living, breathing tabernacles of Almighty God, and He intends us to be treated as such. Our entire physical and spiritual being, meticulously created and bought at an insurmountable price with the Blood of Christ, necessitates a reverential, rightly-ordered kind of care.
The Case for Self-Compassion
Let us make a case, then, for re-prioritizing the virtue of self-compassion—whatever our current vocation, season, or state of health.
The word “compassion” draws from the Latin roots com, meaning “with,” and pati, meaning “to suffer.” Thus, compassion literally means, “to suffer with.” The virtue of self-compassion requires that we willingly suffer with ourselves for God’s sake. This means bearing patiently with our needs and humbly attending to them—or seeking help in doing so—inconvenient or burdensome as this may feel.
The enemy tempts us to pridefully minimize and ignore these needs or shame ourselves for even having them. Disparaging our natural human needs divorces us from our own humanity; self-compassion combats this temptation. Caring for our body as a temple—not an idol—aligns us with God’s natural law. In seeking to treat our bodies as God desires, we accept and cooperate with our God-given human dignity. In choosing to reverence our bodies because He does, we glorify Him Who dwells in us.
Self-Compassion In Practice
So what does this rightly-ordered self-compassion actually look like? At minimum, it means prioritizing the kind of nutrition, hydration, sleep, movement, and health treatments we need to sustain our temple of a body daily and give glory to our indwelling God.
When life overwhelms us, these particular needs are often the first to go—especially in a society that conflates human value with industrial-like performance. Under the guise of “being productive,” we often forego sleep, cut out healthy recreation, or resort to convenience and haste in meals that no longer nourish.
But we are not machines, even if we’ve bought into this lie and hold ourselves to absurd super-human standards. Burnout is only natural as a result. However, when our “systems” become overwhelmed, it isn’t basic physical needs that should get the axe. What we really need is to discern and let go of the additional worldly demands, commitments, or activities threatening those basic needs. We must learn to relinquish our machine-like productivity and return to the limits of holy humanity.
In this sense, the way back to the humanity that defines us is a rightly-ordered self-compassion that draws us, body and soul, to union with our Creator. Deep down, we crave permission to let go of extraneous worldly pursuits that undermine our wellbeing. Yet this permission doesn’t often come from others; they are caught in the same hamster wheel. It comes from encountering God within, and our subsequent efforts to cultivate the virtue of self-compassion against the current of the world—to suffer with and prioritize our human needs even when others won’t.
Encountering Self-Compassion
How might we develop this self-compassion? It grows through an ongoing encounter with our compassionate God, the One whose power is perfected in our weakness. He is not intimidated by our suffering humanity, but insatiably drawn to it. He is Compassion Itself—a Lover who suffers voluntarily and joyfully with us, never becoming weary of or dismissing our needs. Our Lord gently affirms our limitations and, in them, invites us to seek His strength while continually upholding our well-being.
As we learn to accept His love in our needs, we can begin extending His divine compassion to ourselves. Practicing this virtue of self-compassion allows us to serve Christ more deeply and directly within. Jesus tells us, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least of these, you did for Me” (Matthew 25:40). The ‘least of these’ is not restricted to others; it includes reverencing our own bodies and needs, too—especially when it’s the last thing we want to do.
A Model of Self-Compassion
Jesus modeled this rightly ordered compassion consistently throughout His earthly ministry. He showed attentive, unhurried care not only for humanity’s spiritual needs, but our mental and physical needs too.
Immediately after uttering the life-giving words, Talitha koum, to raise a young girl from the dead, Jesus ordered her loved ones to nourish her with something to eat (Mark 5:41-43). He personally fed crowds of 4,000 and 5,000 people, refusing to send them away to find food for fear that they would “collapse along the way” (Matthew 15:3). Not only that, Jesus instructed his disciples to have these crowds recline, inviting them into a posture of physical rest while He fed them (John 6:10).
Our Incarnate Lord prioritized rest for Himself and His disciples, too—retreating often by Himself in solitude. As the pace of their ministry work increased and the disciples suffered deep grief after John the Baptist’s death, Jesus entreated His disciples to “come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest awhile” (Mark 6:31). Once, Jesus even slept soundly while a wild storm tossed their boat, much to the apostles’ dismay (Matthew 8:24).
Some of the most profound conversions during Christ’s ministry happened around basic physical needs. Jesus encountered the woman at the well over their shared human need for water (John 4). After Peter’s betrayal, our Lord invited him to a deeply moving threefold confession and reconciliation—but first, He lovingly fed Peter with breakfast on the beach (John 21:12). Likewise, when Jesus first appeared to the disciples after the resurrection, He asked for a piece of fish to eat as proof that He was truly human; truly risen from the dead (Luke 24:41-43).
If we are to be truly human, we must also imitate our Lord in the way He ate, drank, rested, recovered, and recreated within His work: never excessively, but never apologetically or as an afterthought. He made a point to prioritize the complete well-being of others—physical, mental, and spiritual—and modeled prudent care for His own divine Body to accomplish every part of His Father’s mission.
While we may not practice self-compassion as perfectly as Christ, it is wholly within reach for our imperfect but elevated human nature to try. A life absent from effort to grow in virtue is a life moving away from heaven, not toward it. The virtue of self-compassion moves us toward our highest reality as humans: the truth that we are fearfully and wonderfully made not only for this life, but for even greater things, body and soul, in the next.
We Are Made for Heaven
Indeed, we were created for Heaven—body and soul. The journey there is a battle, and we will not emerge physically unscathed, for suffering is a part of life. Yet neither are our bodies expendable vessels whose only job is to get us to heaven with no further purpose after death. Our bodies will be raised on the last day; we proclaim this emphatically in our Creed. They are an eternal and invaluable necessity of our divinely created being. Therefore, we must reverence our bodies on earth as a fully integrated part of our eternal humanity. Our every bodily action either helps or hurts our soul and others; it either dignifies or degrades us, glorifies God or dishonors Him. Only through and because of our bodies can we do anything good for the Kingdom.
In this divine calling for our bodies rests the virtue of self-compassion, born from our very Creator’s compassion. He invites us in our human needs and limitations to continually encounter Him Who became incarnate—a God-man with human needs—so that in our neediness we might become divine like Him, raised to His glory.
As such, let us not become weary in doing good. (Galatians 6:9).
May we begin with the good of serving God within ourselves through the virtue of self-compassion—that in properly reverencing our own needs, we might become temples of His strength, persevering in our God-given mission to do good for others.
Image: Unsplash+
