Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Thirty-Nine: Compassion

Our Compassionate God

CAC core faculty member James Finley gently reminds us of our infinite preciousness to God. God cannot help but meet us with compassionate love. Offering ourselves compassion is one step to encountering the depths of God’s compassion for us.

Compassion is the love that recognizes and goes forth to identify with the preciousness of all that is lost and broken within ourselves and others. At first it seems as if compassionate love originates with our free decision to be as compassionate as we can be toward ourselves as we sit in meditation. As our practice deepens, we come to realize that in choosing to be compassionate, we are yielding to the compassionate nature of God flowing through us, in and as our compassion toward our self as precious in our frailty.

God is revealed in Christ as a compassionate love that recognizes and goes forth to identify with us as precious in our frailty. This is what Jesus reveals to us in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). We all know the story of the son who goes off against his father’s wishes and squanders his share of his father’s money. When the money runs out, he realizes how foolish he has been and returns home. . . . As he continues on home, ashamed and remorseful, he is not prepared for the moment in which he first looks up to see his father running toward him with open arms.

The father embraces the son as preciousness almost too precious to bear. The son is at once undone and restored to wholeness in a flurry of embraces received and given. The two of them stand together out on the open road, each laughing and crying at once. Each causes the other to lose his balance as each holds up the other. We can sense in their awkward dance of compassionate love the dance we all long to dance. For we all intuit a taste of heaven in the compassionate embrace that welcomes home one who has been lost. . . .

In the actual moment of encounter there is, for the father and son, nothing but their overflowing, compassionate encounter. The parable reveals God’s version of reality. It reveals the way God always is toward us, regardless of how foolish and hurtful we may have been.

Jim teaches how God’s compassion transforms our brokenness:

As we yield to compassion, we are caught in the updraft of grace that carries us aloft. Then, in one single continuous movement of love, compassion draws us downward into the preciousness of all that is lost and broken within ourselves. The deeper the brokenness, the greater the momentum of the descent. The greater the momentum of the descent, the more deeply compassionate love descends into the innermost recesses of our doubts and fears. Suddenly encountering such love, our doubts and fears melt in the love that sets us free.

James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (HarperSanFrancisco: 2004), 279–280, 284. 

Image credit: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, El ensueño (detail), 1931, photograph, Wikiart. 

Image inspiration: What is she thinking? How do you feel seeing her? If you could, what would you say to her? Would you notice the weight she's carrying?

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Prayer For Our Community

Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen.
Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.

Story From Our Community

Father Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations help me relate to others with greater empathy. In our suffering world, this wisdom inspires me with hope in all that transforms us with humility and connects us to greater LOVE. Kindness. Compassion. Peace. Joy. Blessings. Gratitude.
—Maria G. 
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Hear the Call to Compassion and Contemplation

Fr. Richard Rohr shares an overview of the foundational principles guiding his work and the CAC in this MP3 download. Including the Gospel Call for Compassionate Action (Bias from the Bottom) and Contemplative Prayer, discover what it means to explore a contemplative life.

Explore Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations archive at cac.org. 

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