Compassion and My Dilemma

The story of Waitstill and Martha Sharp.

Back in 1939, the American Unitarian Association had put out a call for Unitarians to go to Czechoslovakia and assist the thousands of refugees who were crowding into Prague. Waitstill, a Unitarian minister, and his wife Martha, a social worker who had trained at Chicago’s Hull House, left comfortable lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts in order to answer that call. Soon after their arrival, however, their compassion was awakened when they realized that opponents of the Nazi regime would need more than just humanitarian assistance: they would need to escape Europe. At great personal risk, the Sharps worked in Prague, and later in France, to secure safe passage to the United States for hundreds of men, women, and children. Through the Sharps’ vision and the network of connections they built, the Unitarian Service Committee was eventually established, and the couple received a posthumous “Righteous among the Nations” award from the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel. You can learn more about their story in the Summer 2006 issue of the UU World.
Waitstill and Martha were the parents of two children – a boy and a girl, just 2 and 6 years old – when they answered the call to relocate to Czechoslovakia. Taking the children with them would have been unthinkable, so the Sharps made a responsible decision to leave their children in the care of others. When I read this story, what stayed with me was the sadness of learning that those two children experienced their parents’ heroism as a loss of compassion inside the parent-child relationship. Both felt that their relationship with their parents had been irrevocably damaged by their parents’ departure.
It’s not an uncommon story: parents and others who lead lives of great public compassion often do so at some cost to their personal relationships. Somehow it seems like there’s only so much compassion to go around – and yet if each of us attended only to those in our immediate circle, who would reach out with compassion and love to those who are without a voice, without protection? Because without action, does compassion have any real value?
It’s a dilemma I’m still struggling with. I’d love to hear your thoughts!