Compassion

Compassion is the virtue that brings you closer to the angels; it is the sister of charity, which leads you to God. Ah! Allow your heart to be moved with compassion before the miseries and sufferings of your fellow beings. Your tears are a balm which you pour out on their wounds, and when, out of kind sympathy, you manage to restore their hope and resignation, what delight you will feel! Such delight will of course contain a certain bitterness, because it is born alongside misfortune; however, since it does not have the acrid taste of worldly delights, neither does it have the pungent disappointments of emptiness that worldly pleasures leave in their wake; there is a penetrating gentleness that fills the soul with joy. Compassion, deeply felt, is love; love is devotion; devotion is forgetting oneself. And this forgetfulness, this self-denial on behalf of unfortunates, is virtue par excellence, the kind that the Divine Messiah practiced throughout his life and taught in his holy and sublime doctrine. Once this doctrine is returned to its primitive purity, when all peoples have accepted it, it will bring happiness to the earth, enabling harmony, peace and love to finally reign.

The most appropriate sentiment for enabling you to progress by subduing your selfishness and pride, the one that predisposes your soul to humility, beneficence and love for your neighbor, is compassion! That compassion which expresses itself within you at the sight of your brothers’ and sisters’ suffering, which impels you to reach out to them with a helping hand, and which moves you to tears of sympathy. Therefore, never smother this heavenly emotion in your hearts. Do not do like those hardened, selfish people who avoid the afflicted because the sight of their misery would upset them for a few moments of their carefree  lives. Fear remaining indifferent when you could be useful. Peace of mind bought at the price of culpable indifference is the peace of mind of the Dead Sea, which hides fetid slime and decay in its depths.

However, how far compassion is from causing the trouble and annoyance the selfish person is so afraid of! Without a doubt, on contact with another’s misfortune, the soul rebounds upon itself and experiences a natural and profound ache that makes its entire being vibrate and affects it so painfully. But great will be the compensation when you manage to restore courage and hope to an unfortunate brother or sister who is moved by the contact of a friendly hand, and whose eyes, moist with emotion and acknowledgement, turn to you kindly before gazing into heaven in thankfulness for having sent a consoler, a support. Compassion is the melancholic but celestial precursor of charity, the first of all virtues. Compassion is the sister of charity, whose benefits she prepares and ennobles.

Michel (Bordeaux, 1862)