Quotes About Compassion

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion.

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.

The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.

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.

Once a person recognizes that Jesus's mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.

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.

It is not God who is violent. We are. It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do. God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.

When people get together in solidarity and unity, not out of power but out of powerlessness, then Christ is in their midst.

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.

The "adepts" in all religions are always forgiving, compassionate, and radically inclusive. They do not create enemies, and they move beyond the boundaries of their own "starter group" while still honoring them and making use of them.

Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation." Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think" right.

Mercy unearned undeserved, unnecessary. If it isn't all of those it isn't Mercy. If you think people have to earn it, deserve it, or it is necessary to do it, you have lost the mystery of Mercy and forgiveness

Whatever we are living through, we are in it together. It is not a contest between us. We are good by one another's goodness; we are sinners by one another's sin. In other words, both love and sin are highly contagious.

Jesus himself always went where the pain was. Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now.

The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself.

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.

What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been "bitten" by hatred and violence, and to know that God's heart has always been softened toward us.

Ordinary people in times of shame and doubt needed an anamchara, or a "soul friend." Soon

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

If you want to be important, serve others. And if you want to be at the top, then slave to help everyone else. The

But God loves things by becoming them.

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind.