It happens in a moment and we hardly ever recognise what’s going on in our bodies. We are usually so distracted or absorbed by life that we cannot feel what our soul begs us to feel. And even if we did feel it, we commonly either reject it or deny it. We far too commonly think that entering into our felt experience of life will be too costly or that it won’t benefit us enough. In other words, we don’t think it would be worth it.
Could it just be, however, that we are missing the vital ingredient that would heal our lives, if only we imbibed life’s elixir? Might it be the case that we need this elixir to be loved and to love others?
What on earth is this elixir, you may ask? It is compassion. It is a spiritual feeling of having been encountered, met, endorsed, validated, sponsored, encouraged, healed.
We may do it for ourselves, but truly if we don’t do it, we can never love other people as we are called to love them.
“We love, because God loved us first,” (1 John 4:19) but if we have not experienced this love, we cannot truly love others with the divine love that we ourselves have not yet received from God. We need to taste and touch it first, and God’s love — God’s Presence — is felt in compassion. God knows more than we do how much we need God. And God’s compassion is founded on the principle that God knows our poverty intimately — how much we struggle with sin, which makes us hard to love, because (deeper down) we don’t feel worthy of love. BUT, of course, we are. Love equals Jesus Christ.
We need compassion, but compassion is like a ship passing silently on glassy waters in the night. Compassion will ever evade us if we are ever evading it.
Our default is to haphazardly negotiate the bumpy passage of life, anxiously expecting snares at every turn, never truly realising that every one of those snares is an opportunity — to know ourselves better, to know more of God’s unique purpose, to experience God’s compassion deep within ourselves, so much so to feel the divine love for ourselves — that God is in love with every aspect of creation — in order that we may pass that divine love on. God knows we need to know God’s love, so we can offer that divine love to others.
If only we can meet ourselves, and be comfortable in our own pain, even though that sounds barbaric, then, having experienced the love of God in our mortal bodies in such a personal way, then we are able to pay that love forward into other’s lives.
We cannot pass on what we know nothing about.
We must be able to suffer with ourselves, feeling the divine empathy, before we can suffer with others, where they experience a taste of divine compassion. And this is more poignant than ever in these COVID-19 times. Our needs and the needs of others, both tangible and intangible, are closer to the surface than ever. Stress abounds upon stress even as we relate with others who are also stressed. No wonder conflict occurs in a flash or continues unabated. The easiest thing in the world to do these days is to go about offending people.
We must get back to the very basics of meeting our own bodies and enjoying the psychospiritual connection only we can establish with ourselves when encountering God.
In doing this with a mind for God in prayer, we begin to know the divine, as much as we experience compassion more intimately than ever. This is much different to self-love, which might as well be self-pleasure, but the divine love is something that comes from outside of us even as it works deeply within.
This divine love is probably best considered a supernatural compassion where we know beyond doubt that we are accepted by God unconditionally.
If we want to love others well, to the best of our ability, we must love them with a divine love, and we can only love them with a divine love when we have been loved by the divine.
Photo by Laura Gilchrist on Unsplash
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