The Tender Compassion of our God

Welcome to my new blog! Hospitality is a key theme for Benedictines and this blog is another way to reach out to God's people and welcome them. I hope that you will come back often. I suppose I am feeling a need to write again. which comes up periodically in my life and it has been a while since this last surfaced, but that desire (call?) seems to have come back strongly. A blog seemed a good way to respond. 

The title for this blog, "The Tender Compassion of our God" is taken from the Benedictus [Luke 1:68-79], which we pray every morning in Matins. The Benedictus is the prayer/hope of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, as given to us by the Gospel of Luke and is one of my favorite prayers. It is, along with Mary's Magnificat [Luke1:46-55], which we pray every evening at Vespers, one of the great prayers of liberation found in the Gospels. 

That theme of liberation is a great one for me. It has been present in my own spiritual journey from the time I was a teenager, when I was being taught in my high school religion classes by some great Sisters of Mercy back in the 70's. From my perspective, the liberation that Christ offers on both an individual and a communal level has, as its starting place, the tender compassion of God. Without that tender compassion, we just find ourselves lost and in deep trouble. 

The Incarnation is a lesson in that tender compassion: God so passionately loving humanity, that God almost had to send his Son to become part of it. The infancy narratives, especially in Luke, with its two major prayers - the Benedictus and the Magnificat - are the great songs of liberation celebrating the hope and expectation of God's people that God, does indeed, have great and tender compassion for God's people. 

Our faith journey is one of joy in that liberation. That is not to say that we don't have pain and suffering in our lives or in our communities or in our world. We certainly do. And, in fact, that will be some of what I will muse on in future blog entries. But the point of the Incarnation is that the great liberation of the tender compassion of our God has been offered to us, and is ours for the taking. 

Though we often lead lives so filled with busyness and noise, we, hopefully, journey along a path that leads us to a more contemplative life which is a living into that liberation. That contemplative journey is a way of prayer, a way of non-violence, a way of loving our neighbor, a way of forgiving our enemy, a way of hoping for the "dawn from on high to break upon us." That contemplative life is not just for monks, but for all God's people, though it is certainly lived out differently one person to another. I hope to be exploring more of these themes in future blog entries as aspects of the contemplative life. 

What a great God we have. Let us live in gratitude. Peace be upon you.