Compassion & Mercy
We can call God love, we can call God knowledge, but the best name for God is compassion. Compassion is where peace and justice kiss. Meister Eckhart
Gregg’s Reflection
I am an Enneagram 8, and compassion does not come easy to 8’s. A core belief of 8’s it is unsafe to be weak and vulnerable. So we deny anything weak/vulnerable. But, as Henri Nouwen tells us, “Compassion means to become close to the one who suffers. But we can come close to another person only when we are willing to become vulnerable ourselves.”
It was only when a grateful heart dawned, as I wrote about in the post on Gratitude and Generosity, that compassion became possible. Compassion has grown in my heart as humility has taken root. Letting go of the need to prove myself, I can acknowledge my own vulnerability and weakness, and enter into others’ pain and suffering.
For decades, I saw a judgmental God, ready to whack me when I messed up. My own father was a judgmental perfectionist, and that strongly influenced my picture of my Heavenly Father.
Slowly, I came to see a compassionate God, who loves freely despite the fact that we are imperfect people. As my picture of God changed, I changed.
Read on to discover the compassionate heart of God, and how compassion can be a step towards “taking on the mind of Christ” as Paul exhorts us.
Journaling Prompts
Do you see God as Judgmental or Compassionate? Or, can God be both? How does your picture of God affect your picture of yourself? What does it look like to move from pity to compassion? Why do we need to embrace our own vulnerability and weakness to show compassion?
Scripture
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.
Psalm 51:1
Let your compassion a come to me that I may live, for your law is my delight.
Psalm 119:77
Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.
Isaiah 30:18
They will neither hunger nor thirst , nor will the desert heat or the sun beat down on them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water.
Isaiah 49:10
“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.
Isaiah 54:10
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Matthew 5:7
Be compassionate, just like God in heaven is compassionate.
Luke 6:36
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you.
Ephesians 4:32
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.
Colossians 3:12
Our heart towards the poor is among the surest tests of whether Christ is being formed within us. To ‘remember the poor’ is a primary way to practice simplicity, giving and service, practices fundamental to spiritual formation.
RENOVARE Bible notes on Galatians 2:10
Ancient Writings
Compassion means that if I see my friend and my enemy in equal need, I shall help them both equally. Justice demands that we seek and find the stranger, the broken, the prisoner and comfort them and offer them our help. Here lies the holy compassion of God.
Mechthild of Magdeburg
Compassion is the fire that Jesus came to set on the earth.
Thomas Aquinas
Through compassion, human beings imitate God.
Thomas Aquinas. Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 127. This follows an ancient Jewish teaching that compassion is the very name of God. There is no better way to demonstrate how God passes through us than carrying out our works of compassion.
We can call God love, we can call God knowledge, but the best name for God is compassion. Compassion is where peace and justice kiss.
Meister Eckhart
Modern Writings
Compassion is the fruit of solitude and the basis of our ministry. The purification and transformation to take place in solitude manifest themselves in compassion.
Henri Nouwen, Way of the Heart, p. 24
Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. Those who can sit with their fellow man, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life into a dying heart.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 6/16/20
If you would ask the Desert Fathers why solitude gives birth to compassion, they would say, “Because it makes us die to our neighbor.” To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate. Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, that prevents us from really being with the other.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 6/19/20
Compassion means to become close to the one who suffers. But we can come close to another person only when we are willing to become vulnerable ourselves. The suffering person calls us to become aware of our own suffering. How can I respond to someone’s loneliness unless I am in touch with my own experience of loneliness? How can I be with the poor when I am unwilling to confess my own poverty?
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 6/21/20
What then is care? The word care finds its origin in the word kara, which means “to lament, to mourn, to participate in suffering, to share in pain.” To care is to cry out with those who are ill, confused, lonely, isolated, and forgotten, and to recognize their pains in our own heart. To care is to be present to those who suffer and to stay present even when nothing can be done to change their situation. To care is to be compassionate and so to form a community of people honestly facing the painful reality of our finite existence.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 6/25/20
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 8/10/20
In my mind, pity isn’t even analogous to compassion. Pity is just the paternalistic cousin of contempt. It allows us to see others as “those less fortunate than ourselves” (a term I loathe). Pity keeps the other person at a distance and me in a rarified state of satisfaction. I struggle to think of who would ever truly want it from another person. Compassion, on the other hand, draws us close.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, The Corners, 3/11/24
Compassion is the world’s richest energy source. And yet, in human history of late, compassion remains an energy source that goes largely unexplored, untapped and unwanted. Compassion appears very far away and almost in exile. In acquiescing in compassion’s exile, we are surrendering the fullness of nature and of human nature, for we, like all creatures in the cosmos, are compassionate creatures.
What we all share today is that we are victims of compassion’s exile. The difference between persons and groups of persons is not that some are victims and some are not: we are all victims and all dying from lack of compassion; we are all surrendering our humanity together.
Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice p. xi, xii.
Self-compassion is essential to help us let go of shame that blocks God’s love and peace from mercifying us. From deep inside us, God is trying to get dug out. Listen to God trying to free you at the same time to love yourself.
Catherine T. Nerney, The Compassion Connection: Recovering Our Original Oneness, p. 185.
Compassion is the love that recognizes and goes forth to identify with the preciousness of all that is lost and broken within ourselves and others. As our practice deepens, we come to realize that in choosing to be compassionate, we are yielding to the compassionate nature of God flowing through us, in and as our compassion toward our self as precious in our frailty.
As we yield to compassion, we are caught in the updraft of grace that carries us aloft. Then, in one single continuous movement of love, compassion draws us downward into the preciousness of all that is lost and broken within ourselves. The deeper the brokenness, the greater the momentum of the descent. The greater the momentum of the descent, the more deeply compassionate love descends into the innermost recesses of our doubts and fears. Suddenly encountering such love, our doubts and fears melt in the love that sets us free.
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God, p. 279-280, 284.
As you breathe out, say “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
—St. Symeon the New Theologian
What does it mean to ask Jesus Christ to have mercy on me? It’s to ask God to have mercy on me in the waywardness of my ways. I know by my own actions that I’m not true to the person I really am called to be. I know this in my weakness, so I ask Christ to have mercy on me. At the very heart of this prayer is the heart of Jesus because God is love, and when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. Jesus is like a field of boundless mercy.... There’s an infinite love within us that we can in no way whatsoever increase—because it’s infinite. God is infinitely in love with us. But just as we can’t increase it, we can’t threaten it either. We’re an infinitely loved, broken person. In acceptance of the brokenness, the infinity of the love that shines through the brokenness gets brighter and brighter.
There’s a moral imperative to do our best not to continue with things that are hurtful to ourselves and others. You have your list, and I have mine. That’s important. But grounded in us is in an inner peace that is not dependent on the ability to overcome the hurtful thing. St. Paul had a thorn in the flesh and asked God to remove it, but God said, “Leave it there” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10). The thorn is the teacher, the place where it isn’t looking good, if this is all up to you. But it’s not up to you. It’s up to God giving Godself to you as infinitely lovable in your brokenness and incompleteness. This is experiential salvation.
James Finley and Kirsten Oates, “The Way of a Pilgrim: Session 3,” Turning to the Mystics, season 9, ep. 6, podcast.
Mercy is the water in which we swim. Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it.…
The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional—always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being.
Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too—in the words of Psalm 103—“swim in mercy as in an endless sea.” Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God, p. 20, 25.