Dear Friends,
We pray you are safe and well.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that in God’s economy of abundance, when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
Today's Meditation is about Splagchnizomai: Compassion: John Philip Newell telling a story about his father. It comes to us from Irene Desharnais.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in healthcare, in the workplace, in the Church--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
We hope and pray that you and your loved ones experience genuine peace of mind and heart, and remain in good health during this challenging time.
In this "Season of Ordinary Time" in the Church Year, may this be a time of peace, of healing and hope, of the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron & Jean
MEDITATION 181: Splagchnizomai: Compassion: John Philip Newell tells a story about his father
A story about my father, John Philip Newell. Tues. pm 10/20/2020
My father often needed to be away from home for long periods of time to do his work. This was difficult for him. He loved his family. So, in those days when telecommunications did not so easily allow regular contact from afar, it was his practice when traveling to speak into a cassette tape recorder every day. He would tell us where he was, what he had been doing, whom he had met. Then, every week, he would send a tape home to us.
On one occasion when he had been in a refugee camp for Cambodians in the wake of the Killing fields, he got into a car at the end of a long day's work to be driven to his accommodation for the night. In the camp that day he had been meeting with parents who had lost their children and children who had lost their parents. He wanted to tell us about them. So in the car he began to record. But when he tried to speak, he started to weep. The extraordinary thing about that moment is that he chose not to stop the tape or to erase it. So what I heard as a young man when I listened to the recording was the sound of my father weeping for a few minutes.
How can we choose not to turn off the tape? How can we remain open to the flow of feeling that is an essential part of the pathway of compassion? I believe that if my father had shut down to tears in his life, he would not have been able to do what he did. There is a direct relationship between allowing ourselves to truly feel and the decision to act. Compassionate action is sustained by the courage to feel.
The Greek origin of the word used in our Christian Scriptures to describe compassionate response to the suffering of others does not simply suggest seeing with compassion. It is not even just about feeling with compassion. It is about the very innards of our being flowing with compassion. It is about being moved in our guts. This is how Jesus is described in the Gospel of St. Luke when he sees a mother who has lost her only son. She is a widow and is now following the body of her son for burial in the funeral procession. When Jesus sees her, he has "compassion for her" (Luke 7:13). The Greek verb used
is splagchnizomai, the same word that is translated elsewhere as "bowels of compassion" (1 John 3:17, KJV).
I felt something like this in my father's tears that day as I listened to his weeping. It came from a deep place within him - the deep place we are being invited to reconnect to within ourselves. Compassion is at the heart of our being, waiting to flow again for one another and for those who suffer. Part of the rebirthing of God in our lives and our world is allowing these depths to flow.
This prayer comes to us from Fr. Bryan Massingale's group: Honing a Black Catholic Voice.