The Triple Healing Power of Compassion

Most people pursue happiness; fewer create it. Those who create it are God’s special friends who radiate his love wherever they go, leaving a sparkling comet-trail of joy and peace as they glide through an anguished world. These are the champions of compassion—beautiful glowing meteoroids illuming a path of divine presence in a world that seems to grope in oppressive darkness.

 Everyone is disabled in some way and in need of various kinds of support—sometimes physical support, as when one is in need of transportation, medicine, nursing care, food, housing, etc. More often what is needed is emotional support, which is all too seldom provided, even indirectly or subtly. Being difficult to ask for specifically, it is seldom given as a response. This emotional support is conferred by way of approval, acceptance, affirmation, admiration, compliments, etc. But most significantly, we all stand in need of a third kind of support also—spiritual encouragement, expressed by way of one’s own manifest religious fulfillment, by one’s example of prayerfulness, spiritual sharing, edification, religious guidance, and often by gentle moral persuasion.

These three categories of human support, exercised altruistically in the context of God’s grace, are types of selfless Christian love—“agape love” or fraternal charity as detailed in 1 Cor. 13.

That comforting love benefits both giver and receiver, as Paul implies: “The Father of compassion, the God of all comfort…comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort others in any trouble, by means of the same the same comfort that we ourselves receive from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4).

 This three-fold compassion is of course a God-spawned grace. Yet, in its most transcendent form—which is zeal—this compassion far surpasses a mere “comforting,” of others. As experienced by many saints, zeal is divinely sparked incandescent love for all hellbound sinners (while hating their sin). It is a zeal coupled with Jesus’ own zealous yearning for their repentance, which induces a brink-of hell salvation—a salvation prepaid by Jesus’ love-spilt precious Blood.