Psalms 35:14 Meaning I Behaved Myself as Though It Had

Mettā: Loving-kindness Mettā is the plain wish that another be well. "As though" sounds like pretending, though it names the deliberate work of widening who counts as one's own people; the men on those sickbeds were assembling charges against him, and he stood there the way you stand by a brother. Goodwill like this gets offered before anyone earns it, the way you carry soup to any neighbor's door.

Samānattatā: Sharing the same lot Samānattatā is impartial treatment, one of the four things that hold people together. Friend, brother, mother: these are names for the people already inside the fence, and he hands them out to men standing well outside it. Nothing in the mourning is held back for a worthier recipient, the way a host sets the same food in front of every guest at the table.

Karuṇā: Compassion Karuṇā is the heart moving toward another's pain. Bowing is the body's answer before any argument about whether these men deserved one, knees and head going down as they do at a graveside. Their sickness reached him bodily, and the fasting and sackcloth followed from that rather than from any weighing of who they were.

Pema: Affection Pema is fond love, the kind with a grip in it. Sorrow follows it the way a shadow follows a body, and mourning a mother is the heaviest sorrow most people ever carry; spending that weight on an enemy costs him something. The grief is itself the evidence that his goodwill went all the way down, since nobody weeps like that over a formality.

Khanti: Patient endurance Khanti is the strength to bear what comes back. What came back was mockery and gnashing of teeth, and the bowed body stays bowed in the telling, unrevised by what it earned him. Conduct that keeps its shape under contempt is a rock the wind does not shake, and the shape here is a man on his knees for people who are laughing at him.