Boulder – Author Alice Walker urged compassion, even for the most reviled acts, at a commencement ceremony Saturday for about 350 students at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University.
“Compassion does not stop at right and wrong,” Walker said at Macky Auditorium on the University of Colorado campus.
She mentioned the shootings at Virginia Tech and also said dictators like Adolf Hitler deserve the “human expression of warmth” that compassion extends. Without that compassion, she said, “How are we ever to see these same shadowy parts of ourselves and do the real work of change?”
Walker, who received a Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Color Purple,” told the students to become a “human sunrise” of hope and compassion.
“When the news is so horrendous that meditation itself seems useless, I say to that, find a human sunrise,” Walker said.
