Seeing the body of a little boy washed ashore from the capsized boat his family used to escape the ravages of war in Syria or the face of a young mother giving birth in a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp in Eastern Europe is so wrenchingly painful that we catch ourselves looking away. What will compassion mean if we truly engage these images which are not just pictures on our television screens but real, living stories of unimaginable suffering?
What does it mean to have compassion? What does it mean to be the body of Christ in the world? Can we truly enter into the broken places, the shattered lives, the convoluted and complex political realities that make up our twenty-first-century world? How do we see the world through the broken, loving heart of Christ? Television commentators often warn us of images that may be disturbing—“you may want to look away,” they say. How, really, do we love our neighbors as ourselves? Compassion surely will break our hearts.
Teresa of Avila, a practical, no-nonsense sixteenth-century saint and mystic, knew something about compassion:
Christ has no body on earth but yours.
No hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless people now.1
Compassion requires acts and deeds and yes, compassion makes us human. Acts of compassion mean caring for one another and those we’ll never meet. Compassion is about political involvement, willingness to embrace difficult issues, courage to expose injustice and inequality, readiness and willingness to act. These are acts of prayer, of entering into another’s heart and hurt, another’s suffering. These are acts of bravery, audacity, boldness, selflessness. Compassion exacts and demands commitment.
Compassion is feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the imprisoned, caring for the sick, burying the dead, counseling the doubtful, instructing the ignorant, correcting sinners, comforting the sorrowful, forgiving all injuries, bearing wrongs with patience, praying for the living and the dead. These are the hard works of mercy, of compassion.
May we live uneasily with our comfortable and privileged lives. May we never grow heartless or insensitive. May our hearts be open to loosing the bonds of injustice, to undoing the thongs of the yoke, to letting the oppressed go free, to breaking every yoke (Isaiah 58:6). May our hearts be broken.
O God, help us to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into your house and ours, to acknowledge the naked and cover them, and not to hide ourselves from your own kin. Take away our hearts of stone. Make us your body, your hands, your feet. Make us your eyes for showing Christ’s compassion to the world.
REFLECTION
If we truly allow ourselves the spirit of compassion—the cost of compassion—our worlds surely will be turned upside down. Our hearts will be broken. Compassion is more than concern, more than empathy, much more than understanding and kindness.
In what ways does compassion entail more than concern or empathy, more than understanding and kindness?
What does it mean to you that compassion is an act of prayer?
How do we avoid having hearts of stone to become Christ’s body, hands, feet?
How do we become Christ’s eyes for showing compassion to the world?
What is the cost of compassion?
Devotion
1. Saint Teresa of Avila in her iconic poem, “Christ Has No Body.”
Devotion
Devotion as prayer? It’s an odd word with multiple meanings. Its Latin root, devitio, means “total dedication.” It also implies devotional acts—prayers and readings, rituals and practices—for focusing on God’s presence. How might devotion become another lens for looking at the world—an attitude, a posture, another act of prayer?
This morning as I sit at our breakfast table, streams of warm sunshine spill across the room filling the open space with light and a tangible sense of well-being. In the tradition of Christians, I bow my head to offer a prayer of thanks for oatmeal and blueberries, for light and life and the day’s work ahead of me. My Native American friends might dance or drum their devotion. Sufis would whirl their bodies in graceful circles of motion as their habit for expressing devotion. Buddhists likely would sit quietly. Hindus might offer sacrifices. Devote Jews probably would bob their heads back and forth. Showing devotion is to practice dedication and discipline. Devotion honors the gifts of life and makes holy the ordinary ground of ordinary lives. Devotion pulls us away from self-absorption and our ego-centered selves into the overwhelming love and amazing grace of God. The reverence of devotion makes space for the presence of the sacred.
Later in the morning, a dear friend and I spend an hour together catching up with each other’s lives—a phone conversation, a holy discussion. We talk about things that matter and make a difference, issues that enrich our lives. We have known each other for almost fifty years; ours is a devoted friendship. As younger women, we spent hours together discussing thorny theological problems or wresting meaning out of the challenges of our particular stage in life. Now we are grandmothers who discover God’s presence in the presence of one another.
In the afternoon, feeling guilty about the diversions that sometimes take me away from the discipline of writing, I glue myself to my computer and find there another experience of devotion. Writing becomes a devotional act marked by satisfaction and frustration, focus and fervor—“when it was good, it was very good and when it was bad, it was really bad.” Writing becomes a holy deed, a thin place, prayer.
In between these ordinary events, there are exchanges of emails, a moment for watching the fog as it drapes itself across the mountains that preside over my corner of the world, time for working on a satisfying needlepoint project and imagining the next design waiting among my canvases, and the ever-present comfort of books, their siren call and mythic importance so much a part of my own holy ground.
As a child, my family made a habit of evening devotions. It was a way of centering ourselves and coming together to acknowledge our dependence and our need for God’s presence in daily life. Later on when I was away at university, I would visit my grandparents who lived nearby. Rarely did I spend those occasional weekends with my grandparents that we didn’t sit together around their kitchen table for devotions. Their profound faith was evident in the prayers they prayed for each of their grandchildren, for the hurts of the world, and for every other need they felt inclined to share. In their seemingly rock-solid belief in a God who was nearby, a God who took their everyday lives seriously, I learned something about devotion. And in those defining years of my own search for a God I could make sense of, their total dedication made a mark.
Living daily life as an act of devotion can expand our worldview, stretch our imaginations, inspire creativity. Even the ordinary tasks of daily life become extraordinary, worthy of worship and set apart. These experiences of devotion are thin places, described in Celtic mythology as holy spaces where the visible and the invisible world come close, even touch. They are the holy ground of commitment and focus, dedication and perseverance.
Devotion makes more of us. It requires attention and single-mindedness. Devotion is life-giving, invigorating. The discipline of devotion draws us into the living presence of God and transforms our daily lives into prayer.
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