“You may call God love; you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.”
— Meister Eckhart.
We ended the previous article saying, “the one quality that can offset the deficiencies that empathy sometimes falls prey to is undoubtedly, COMPASSION.” Yes, indeed! Compassion is that outstanding quality which has an immense impact, both on every individual and the society as a whole. It is a pity that people consider compassion as a weakness rather than a strength. In a world that favours cut-throat competition and power-mongering, compassionate people are seen as ‘weak individuals’, lacking strong qualities such as determination, firmness and steadfastness. The milieu of priestly and religious life is not an exception to this rule. In this final article on the emotional dimension of my wholeness paradigm, it behoves well to discuss, what I would term as, ‘the pinnacle of all human qualities’, and as I had mentioned in an earlier issue, “compassion is a Godly quality.”
There is one person in the Catholic tradition, who stands as a symbol of compassion. He has been proclaimed as the patron saint of compassion. He has stood the test of times to truly embody and symbolize a quality that was becoming obsolete and redundant. In a cultural and religious context wherein, even the Catholic Church was waging wars and crusades against its enemies, this person stood apart and lived a life of compassion. And that person is, Saint Francis of Assisi, who is one of my all-time favourite saints. In his ‘Canticle of the Creatures’ or ‘Laudato Sì’, Saint Francis demonstrated his deep appreciation and love for all creatures. He understood that all living things were interconnected and that every creature was related to the other as if they were all ‘one family’. No wonder then, he could address the sun as “brother” and moon as “sister”. We will talk more about him in the course of this article.
Fr. Dr. Joseph Jeyaraj, sdb
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