Compassion

I have many things to be confused about at this point in my spiritual journey. In many ways I know less about God than I did 10 years ago, and certainly less about what it means, personally, to be a faithful follower of Christ. But within that sea of confusion and not-knowing, I am clear about one thing: I want to learn to be a more compassionate human being. I have no idea where else I am going, but I do know that I am being called into learning something about compassion.

In the last few years, God has given me a couple of glimpses of what compassion can be: mystical experiences in which I have been given the supernatural gift of compassion. I wrote about them last October in the entry entitled The Teaching Moment. How, then, do I “learn” compassion? How do I live into the glimpse God has given me of what can be? How can I be intentional about acquiring a virtue that can only be a gift from God?

My desire for compassion started as a small impulse--a quiet but insistent urge. It grew in me almost unnoticed. Even the times God gifted me with compassion, the experience soon became lost to memory in the details of my days. But the impulse to pursue compassion must have been growing deep in my soul for some time, unbeknownst to me. A few weeks ago, that hidden impulse took root and has since become irrisitable.

It seems like it is a paradoxical thing, this learning of compassion. It is not something I can cultivate, only something I can receive. And yet I won’t receive it unless I cultivate it. A quality I pursue until I am captured by it. That’s the paradox—a paradox that creates the need for a delicate balance between agency and receptivity. The paradox that I find at the core of all things of God.