Reclaiming God’s Compassion Within

There’s a refrain that persists throughout the forty days of Lent: ‘The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.’ Each morning, the Book of Common Prayer offers this sentence prior to the psalms to worship the Lord with psalms. These brief sentences, or preces, change with the liturgical seasons. When Easter Day arrives, there will be a new refrain for the new season. But for the season of Lent, this sentence means to shape heart, mind, and soul with the gentleness of God in the midst of our failures and sin.

Sentence prayers have a precious place in the hearts of our spiritual ancestors. The Jesus Prayer is the most known and beloved of sentence prayers among the desert fathers, though they also suggested other brief scriptures to ‘pray without ceasing.’ (1 Thessalonians 5.17) ‘O God make haste to help me!’, ‘Lighten my darkness,’ or even ‘Help!’ were other sentence prayers the desert fathers commended to abide in Christ. I quite like the simple prayer that St Barsanuphius advised, too: ‘God knows what is best.’¹

In practice, one need not belabor which sentence prayer is the ‘correct’ prayer. Praying and staying with a phrase is the key. Spiritual fruit comes from stability. And for Christians who practice the liturgical year, praying a phrase or verse of Scripture drawn from the spiritual theme of the season for an entire season shapes and heals the soul.

The Inner Conflict of Vicarious Compassion

Taking these words to one’s lips and one’s heart is one thing; to truly pray them from the heart is easier said than done. There are only eight words in the meditation: ‘The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.’ Yet how many Christians feel distant from an actual experience of God’s compassion? The compassion of God seems remote for many.

In my pastoral experience, I’ve noticed a pattern among many devoted, faithful Christians: it is much easier to believe in the compassion and tenderness of God for a friend than to believe it for one’s own soul. How often in the church do you hear someone casually admit, ‘I’m my own worst critic’? Pastors struggle with this, too. I’m familiar with the struggle myself.

This is compassion experienced in a vicarious way, a second-hand encounter with God’s mercy. It is like living out the second half of the Great Commandment to love your neighbor by cutting off the final two words ‘as yourself’. This is neither a holy practice of self-denial nor the way of Christ. It is more akin to self-rejection than holy self-denial. My favorite novelist, George Bernanos, wrote these words, spoken through one of his characters: ‘Above all, never despise yourself. It is difficult to despise ourselves without offending God in us.’²

This instinct to extend the tenderness of God to another while refusing it for one’s own soulf is, in fact, rooted in shame. The source and causes of this shame is a topic for another day, and it’s a lengthy topic at that. Sources of shame are endlessly variable from person to person. Suffice it to say that a culture obsessed with productivity, image, and performance provides ripe conditions for shame. Daily messages from these cultural idols leave one in a spiritual wilderness, aching for relief.

The sources of shame are not only external. We are culpable ourselves, too. Shame dwells within us because we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We can easily pray like David in his great penitential prayer, ‘For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.’ (Ps 51.3) Yet we often pursue healing and redemption in a disordered way. Like our ancient parents, we hide. We seek shelter in the world’s shadows, turning to comforts that cannot redeem or heal. In these moments, the Enemy of God seeks to shape our minds with doubt. His strategy with shame is that one doubt the character of God to reallyact with gentleness. It is another form of our Enemy’s ancient deception, ‘Did God say…?’

Repenting Into God’s Compassion

When shame shapes one’s thinking, it’s crucial to heal one’s thought patterns with scripture and prayer. Combining scripture with prayer is the best remedy to flawed or distorted thinking. That’s why I embrace this simple prayer phrase to retrain one’s thoughts, ‘The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.’

The wisdom here is to wrap the mind around a brief phrase so that the soul pursues the presence of God in a specific way. St Paul warned about being conformed to the patterns of this world, urging the church instead to ‘be transformed by the renewal of your mind.’

Though it may not seem so, this kind of prayer is repentance. Repentance is not simply changing one’s behavior from sinful patterns. The original Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means ‘to change one’s mind.’ When the Evil One has assaulted us with doubts and lies, we change our thinking in an active way. We place true words of God on our lips, in our minds, and on our hearts. Renewing one’s mind with the truths of God is a way of practicing repentance—a Lenten practice, to be sure.

The Compassion Word Picture

The word ‘compassion’ in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin also redeem and illuminate our understanding of God’s compassion toward us.

The Hebrew word for mercy or compassion is rahamim, which may also be translated as ‘womb.’ As Thomas Torrance notes, ‘God’s mercy or compassion is described in terms of the compassion of a mother for her unborn or newly born baby. Hence, compassion is a good translation for the feeling which a mother has for her baby for they are both within one body or of one body.’³

In our world, compassion is often a passing sentiment, but in the ancient world, it emerged from the depths of one’s body and soul. The Latin etymology of compassion means ‘with suffering’, to be with another in their suffering. In the Gospels, Jesus is ‘moved with compassion’ when he sees the multitudes suffering from hunger and disease. English translations of Jesus’ compassion do not convey the deep movement within our Lord’s body and soul. The Greek word for compassion is splagchnizesthaiwhich refers to one’s guts or intestines. The Greek word itself sounds like a violent movement! As Torrance said, ‘compassion is one of the most pregnant and profound words in the whole of the New Testament.’⁴It means that Jesus literally felt pain in his own body when he witnessed human suffering. This powerful force, this deep movement is the true meaning of God’s compassion for us.

An Ongoing Epiphany

To discover God’s compassion as a powerful force may be an epiphany itself. But the most important epiphany—a recovery, of sorts—is reclaiming God’s compassion for one’s own soul, not only the souls of others. With any recovery, any insight, the way of deep change lies with simple, daily habits. Simple habits like repeating the prayer ‘The Lord is full of compassion and mercy’ over and over again, not only in Lent, but in any season when one doubts the gentle, tender love of God for their wounded soul.

1. Barsanuphius and John, Letters from the Desert: A Selection of Questions and Responses, ed. John Behr, Popular Patristics Series. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003). ↩︎
2. Bernanos quoted in Jacque Phillippe, Interior Freedom, 36. ↩︎
3. TF Torrance, Incarnation, 132. Emphasis mine. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎