Quotes about Empathy

Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than "those who are going to heaven.

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.

Human sympathy is the best and easiest way to open the heart space and to make us live inside our own bodies. God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it's okay if it takes a while to get there. Our central message again bears repeating: God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.

Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it.

Don't start by trying to love god, or even people. Love rocks and elements first. Move to trees, then animals, and then humans… It might be the only way to love, because how you do anything, is how you do everything.

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. —St. Francis of Assisi13

in fact, that's largely what it means to be loving. You can hold for them what they cannot yet hold. You can transform for them what they cannot yet transform. You do that by not returning their negativity and fear in kind, as most people will do.

When we learn to love anyone or anything, It is because they have somehow, if just for a moment, Mirrored us truthfully yet compassionately to ourselves.

Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

Jesus revealed how to bear the pain of the world instead of handing on the pain to those around you. When you stop resisting suffering, when you can really do something so foolish as to welcome the pain, it leads you into a broad and spacious place where you live out of the abundance of Divine Love. I can't promise you pain will leave quickly or easily. To forgive is not the same as to forget.

Once I know that all suffering is both our suffering and God's suffering, I can better endure and trust the desolations and disappointments that come my way. I can live with fewer comforts and conveniences when I see my part in global warming. I can speak with a soft and trusting voice in the public domain if doing so will help lessen human hatred and mistrust. I can stop circling the wagons around my own group, if doing so will help us recognize our common humanity.

It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be "right.