Skillful Means in Christian-Tradition Compassion Formation

Traditional Christian practice traditions contain no practices explicitly identified as compassion practices. Nonetheless, compassion formation processes run through virtually every practice tradition in Christianity. And at least one contemporary practice is intentionally formulated to foster compassion by drawing, in part, from processes, understandings, and sensibilities that appear within traditional Christian contemplative practice. That contemporary compassion practice, developed by the Center for Engaged Compassion (CEC), can serve as an entry point for examining the nature of skillful means in relation to compassion formation processes found within Christian-tradition contemplative practices. This article will examine how a notion of skillful means may apply to Christian-tradition approaches to compassion formation by naming and explicating a number of compassion-fostering “capacities” as they show up in and through the CEC Compassion Practice: capacities for “framing”; “foundational” capacities; “formational” capacities; and “functional” capacities. It is hoped that by widening the field of compassion-formation resources to those within Christian practice traditions this analysis may offer insights for expanding, strengthening, or nuancing perspectives and processes that might be developed within a secular compassion cultivation program.