5th Sunday of Lent: Compassion Creates New Possibilities

This is the next article in a series of Suggested Lenten Practices for 2010.

Lent 2010: A Journey into the Compassion of God

God’s compassion often leads to unimagined, creative encounters and solutions, as in today’s gospel where the Pharisees come before Jesus with the woman caught in adultery. God overturns our preconceptions, to change what we plan and even how we think. Lent calls us to an encounter with Jesus, where we realize our own limitations and sinfulness, hear his invitation to a new way of living, and make a choice to go in the new way that has been opened.

Spiritual Practice: All the community is invited to a common spiritual practice, in addition to whatever you have chosen to do individually.

• Consider this week’s core questions: How can I come to perceive as God does, with compassion and creativity? How do I cooperate with God in freeing people from the effects of brokenness and sin?
• We haven’t “arrived” – we’re broken, we make mistakes, we’re not-yet clear reflections of the love of God. The God of Compassion calls us to do what we need to do to live fully and freely who we are created to be. When you look into the mirror this week, try to imagine yourself as God sees you – deeply beloved.
• We are challenged to be freed from our “either/or” habits, ideas, and judgments, and to engage in an encounter with Compassion that opens a third way not yet imagined. This week do an intentionally creative act with attentiveness and gratitude for God’s infinite creativity – try a new recipe, paint a room or a picture, take a photo of a beautiful sunset or smile, plant in your garden, write a letter to a loved one, move to music…and notice what new thing God is opening in your life.

For Further Reflection, Justice Intersections:

This is the 30th anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. When faced with the needs of his people, he had a change of heart that eventually led him to courageously face political power with uncomfortable truths. He is a model of compassion for the oppressed.

“To know the Compassionate One is to do compassion.” Thomas Aquinas said that compassion is not pure feeling, but implies moral decision-making (electio) and doing. In Biblical spirituality the works of mercy are actions done for others, and compassion in the Bible is more often used as a verb than a noun or adjective. Compassion is about acting to relieve the pain of others and to bring liberating justice (for self and others).

“A church that does not unite itself to the poor in order to denounce from the place of the poor the injustice committed against them is not truly the church of Jesus Christ…We either serve the life of Salvadorans or we are accomplices in their death… we either believe in a God of life or we serve the idols of death.” (Oscar Romero)

Take stock of your commitment to doing works of mercy and justice. Whose needs are you becoming aware of? What situations have been arising in your prayer? How is God calling you at this time to act on behalf of the oppressed or powerless?