What It's About

TRIBEWORK is about consuming the process of life, the journey, together.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Compassion – Agency to Blessed Healing

Compassion
comes in steady,

Soothing
the aching heart,

A kindness
always ready,

Renewing hope, again, to start.

***

Compassion is the miracle of God;
the agency of blessing able to soothe the aching heart. It is ever ready in its
kindness, opening doors to hope, and the courage to start, afresh. Compassion
finds reason for a new hope; one that is miraculous (and unexplained) in the
finding.

But compassion is not easy, for it
relies on a solemn heart, motivated in purity, and dissuaded from a
self-manufactured solution. No, compassion must come from elsewhere.

Compassion is both the gift of God
and, therefore, inexplicable. She is inscrutable, and, like empathy,
unknowable, and only always felt.

The Giving Of Compassion

Perhaps there are more people who
wish to be compassionate than can be. Some may yearn to be compassionate but
find they struggle. They may not have been compassionate with themselves. They
may not have had opportunity to connect.

The genuine reaches of compassion
are singed by the flames of suffering. It is when we experience our own
suffering that we first notice the suffering of the world about us. This
suffering is the bleak reality. But it lights up the juices of compassion and
the liquid of grace steams, permeating into action.

The giving of compassion becomes
the only way in such circumstances.

What is natural cannot be
suppressed. To know compassion, and to give it, both, are gifts from God—to be
owned and appreciated and respected. It’s a responsibility. Compassion has
another role in harmonising any of the sinful pride we might experience for
having been so gifted. This is not a gift we have given ourselves! It’s of God.
All glory goes to him.

The Receiving Of Compassion

Is there anything better on this
whole earth, when it is needed, than the receipt of compassion? Everyone needs
compassion; even, and especially,
those gifted to give their compassion. For, they may wonder why it is they give
yet don’t receive.

Something wondrous happens when we
receive somebody else’s compassion. We become energised with a certain
unspeakable magnanimity for ourselves. Suddenly from within grows a hope and a
belief in ourselves to get through.

This is the power of love. The
kindness in compassion creates an indelible space through which God works
mysteriously and therapeutically. It brings us to life.

***

Compassion makes all the
difference in the world to healing. In its silent way it eases open the
barriers holding us to a depressed world, such that there may be faith again to
explore an emerging hope. In compassion, God begins to work a miracle.