I thought this was interesting.. "Compassion, as is widely known, is at the core of Christianity. Jesus summed up all of his teachings with the commandment to love God with our entire being, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Indeed, his call is more radical than that. Loving our neighbor involves extending compassion not only to the wounded and needy, the demonized and despised, but also to people who revile, violate, and persecute us. ‘Love your enemies,’ Jesus invites, ‘bless those who curse you, pray for those who persecute you, and show compassion to those who hate and do evil.’ This radical ethic of compassion seems extraordinary to the point of being unattainable—or attainable only to the gifted few. When the Amish find the capacity to forgive a man who has killed their schoolchildren, when Nelson Mandela finds it in his heart to invite his jailor of twenty-seven years to stand at his side during his inauguration, when a Palestinian woman who has lost her son in a terrorist bombing raises an Israeli boy, and raises him as a Jew, it shimmers with the miraculous. Ordinary folk like us stand in awe, amazed and inspired. We also can feel indicted and shamed. For the truth is, loving our enemies is excruciatingly difficult. How do we love our ‘enemy,’ an incarcerated spouse batterer, for example, when they terrify and repulse us? How do we love our enemy when, mired in shame and our own castigation, our enemy is our self? How do we love our ‘enemy’ when our enemy, the person who most repels and infuriates me, is my very own child, or partner, or parent?.... ....Jesus came with a life-transforming spiritual path, a path that restores us to our compassionate essence and deepens our capacities to extend compassion even in the most difficult of circumstances. The admonition to love our enemies is not a mandate for Christian perfectionism, an impossible law to intensify our already burdened sense of shame. The Christian gospel is an antidote to shame not a millstone to increase it."
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 14:11:33 +0000
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