"Setting
out to enter into the contemplatively realized community
that compassionate love discloses will result in frustration
if we expect to succeed in living up to some hoped for ideal of becoming,
in word and action,
the compassionate person we know deep down
we really are and are called to be.
But, fortunately for us,
our progress on the path of compassionate living
is not measured primarily in terms of learning never to fail
in our efforts to be compassionate.
Rather, we move along the path in the self-transforming realization
that
each failure in compassion is, in essence, an opportunity
to be compassionate toward ourselves as invincibly precious
and lovable even in our failure to be compassionate.
Approached in this way, the path forward consists of discovering
again and again that our lives are invincibly established
in a wholeness that reigns supreme in the midst of our unruly and wayward
ways.
Silenced and dumbfounded by the way compassionate love
makes our failure to progress the very stuff out of which we progress,
we move along the path of our self-transformation.
Moving thus, we no longer recognize oursleves and others according
to the old markers of progress and attainment.
For our very notion of progress and attainment
have become themselves transformed in the gratitude and humility
that arises each time compassionate love is given and received."
The
Contemplative Heart by James Finley
Read more from James Finley in Merton's Palace of Nowhere