True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.
Where love is strong, forgiveness can be there for us before there is any movement on our part. Something special happens when forgiveness is given fulfillment by its recognition and acceptance. Sorrow and understanding can be involved in healing. The words needed may be, "I’m sorry," and it may take time before it is clear that the words are real. But forgiveness is given, not earned. Healing may take time; the forgiveness is gift. Where there is love, the gift will not be withheld.
Compassion, even towards one's enemies, is a sign of nobleness and spiritual perfection.
It is no longer good enough to cry peace—we must act peace, live peace, and live in peace.
The world is hungry for goodness and recognizes it when it sees it...When we glimpse it in people we applaud them for it. We long to be just a little like them. Through them we let the world’s pain into our hearts, and we find compassion.
At our birth we emerge from the root mystery of the cosmos, a deep and silent mystery into which we will one day be reabsorbed. Our own lives are a spiral pattern of creative unfolding, death, and regeneration. Fashioned out of the creative power of starlight and the fecund body of the Earth, we are the children of Earth and starry heaven caught up in the timeless rhythms of the celestial dance.
To wonder is to stand in awe of the ultimate mystery of life and to understand that mystery exists not merely in the ecstatic but in the ordinary daily life. Eliot Deutsch observed that wonder, unlike curiosity, does not try to figure out, or to explain. We do not wonder "at," "about," or "why" —we wonder with.
If I had influence with the good angel who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
To be a contemplative is to be a watch in the night for the approach of Mystery. And it is a readiness to be transformed in an engagement with that Mystery.