Feast of Feasts
Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany
with St. Francis
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Advent 3 – Compassion
Compassion means feeling another person’s pain and wanting to do something in order to relieve their suffering. The word compassion, itself, comes from Latin and means: to suffer together.
An excellent example of living with compassion in this day and age is Episcopal priest Becca Stevens, founder of Thistle Farms, an enterprise run by survivors of sexual abuse, trafficking, and addiction.
Stevens says: “My mother’s example of showing love through practical means gave me the wherewithal to open a home for women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction more than twenty-five years ago in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a small house for five women. I said: ‘Come live free for two years with no authority living with you….’ I figured that’s what I would want if I were coming in off the streets or out of prison….I did it because sanctuary is the most practical ideal of all.
“I wanted to do the work of healing from the inside out. And that begins with a safe home. “From its humble beginning, Thistle Farms now has thirty global partners that employ more than 1,600 women. The mission to be a global movement for women’s freedom is broad and is growing exponentially.” Stevens noted that in the beginning, it seemed silly to think that by starting a small community, they could somehow change the world. By the time Thistle Farms became a global movement, she realized that it was even sillier to believe that the world could change if all of us do nothing.
As Mother Teresa said, “Small things done with great love will change the world.”
“There is no secret formula to experiencing the sacred in our lives,” Stevens said. “It just takes practice and practicality. The deep truth of our lives and the fullness we are striving for don’t happen with someone giving us the code to deep knowledge. Meaning and faith are not secret things. Sometimes what we need most is to remind one another of how the divine is all around us, calling us to see and taste it for ourselves.”
Stories of the compassion of Saint Francis abound and it is difficult to choose just one. The saint was so deeply touched by the compassion of God that he wanted to show that same compassion to the world. Once fearful of lepers, he moved to the outskirts of Assisi to live with the lepers. It was there that he learned to see the lepers, and God, in a new way. He found loving compassion for the unlovable, the ugly, the despised. He began to understand the power of the saving love of God in the weakness of humanity.
Creator God, you hate nothing you have made, so that while we were yet sinners, you sent our Savior Jesus Christ to live among us. Looking with compassion on the crowds, seeing the harassed and helpless as being like sheep without a shepherd, he showed us how you are always seeking and saving the one that is lost. Give us the grace to suffer with those who suffer and to share the joy of those who rejoice as we love others with the love you have for us. This we ask for your mercy’s sake. Amen.
Interesting word, compassion. It can embody anything from a friendly word and smile to going way out of your way on someone’s behalf—helping a distressed motorist change a tire, mowing the yard for an elderly neighbor, visiting a sick friend in the hospital.
“The knowledge that changes the heart changes you and your interaction with the world, and that new way of knowing and acting changes the world around you and beyond you in space and time.”
In July of 1977, Jean Donovan traveled to El Salvador where she worked as a lay missioner in La Libertad, along with Ursuline nun Dorothy Kazel. Working in the parish of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, they provided help to refugees of the Salvadoran Civil War and the poor, including shelter, food, transportation to medical care, as well as burying the bodies of the dead left behind by the death squads.
Compassion is empathy in action, and as I reflect on this Christian virtue, I see that the Scoutmaster of my Boy Scout troop embodied this Christ-like response. Scouting was an important part of my childhood. I started out in Cub Scouts by attending my brother’s meetings with my mom as the Den Mother. When I was finally old enough to be a Cub Scout, I joined Scouting and remained active all through elementary school, junior high, high school and my first year of college. Scouting was good to me. I got to see the world—twice backpacking out west at the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico and traveling to Sweden for the World Jamboree. But most importantly, I was in a troop that considered itself to be a ministry. The leaders were passing along the grace and love they received in Jesus.
Asking people how they came to faith in Jesus and then how they found the Episcopal Church is something I (Frank) love to do. One woman said she went by herself to church when she was 12. She was raised in New York City by parents who were not religious. One Sunday, she walked to the closest church, which was an Episcopal Church. A woman who she had learned to call a “bag lady” shuffled in with all her possessions after the service was well underway. She said she knew what was coming and she did not want to see the woman pushed back out onto the street. But that was not what occurred. The woman sat down in a pew behind a well-dressed woman wearing pearls, with every hair on her head in perfect place. She turned to face the bag lady and her face lit up! She smiled and moved to sit beside her as if she were an old friend she hadn’t seen in years. The well-heeled woman opened her prayer book and went through the liturgy with the person who was homeless. She told me that she had no idea what the preacher said that Sunday. “I was hooked from that moment on,” she told me. “It was absolutely compelling. I felt like I had seen Jesus in church that morning.”