Quotes about Compassion

The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods:

To hope for a better future in this world—for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful, and wounded world—is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to the gospel as an afterthought.

That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.

The line between good and evil runs, not between 'us' and 'them', but down the middle of each of us.

He might have been a wafer in the hands Of priests this day, or music from the lips: Of red-robed choristers, instead he slips Away from church, shakes off our linen bands To don his apron with a nurse: he grips And lifts a stretcher, soothes with gentle hands The frail flesh of the dying, gives them hope, Breathes with the breathless, lends them strength to cope.

How would you describe a mature person?

we recognize that the world as a whole needs, longs for, aches and yearns and cries out for forgiveness—for that collective, global sigh of relief that means that nobody need seek vengeance ever again; that nobody will bear a grudge ever again; that the million wrongs with which the world has been so horribly defaced will be put right at last;

There is a danger in Christians supposing that they simply have to be flaky, awkward, against the government all the time, continually doing things upside down and inside out. Some people of course seem to be born that way, and use the gospel imperative as an excuse for foisting their own cussedness or arrogance on everyone else.

You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word "love" as you do so.

Forgiveness doesn't mean that we don't take evil seriously after all; it means that we do.

Wherever he went, he was celebrating the arrival of God's kingdom, as often as not by partying with people who would normally be excluded because of their apparently shady moral background. Wherever

They ask three simple questions: Who is going to be at special risk when this happens? What can we do to help? And who shall we send?