Quotes about Compassion

Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

The significance of Jesus' wounded body is his deliberate and conscious holding of the pain of the world and refusing to send it elsewhere. The wounds were not necessary to convince God that we were loveable; the wounds are to convince us of the path and price of transformation. They are what will happen to you if you face and hold sin in compassion instead of projecting it in hatred.

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. There is no path toward love except by practicing love. War will always produce more war. Violence can never bring about true peace.

I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received.

you are often most gifted to heal others precisely where you yourself were wounded, or wounded others.

Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.

the Eucharistic bread and wine are not a prize for the perfect or a reward for good behavior. Rather they are food for the human journey and medicine for the sick. We come forward not because we are worthy but because we are all wounded and somehow "unworthy.

Francis's starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness

forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether you are Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Jewish. Forgiveness is one of the patterns that is always true, it is part of The Story. There is no specifically Catholic way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth.

Listen to his dangerous and inclusionary thinking: "My Father's sun shines on the good and the bad, his rain falls on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Or "Don't pull out the weeds or you might pull out the wheat along with it. Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:29—30). If I had presented such fuzzy thinking in my moral theology class, I would have gotten an F!

Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world's domination systems.