My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place,
When I was woven in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
All the days ordained for me were written in Your book
Before one of them came to be.

Psalm 139:15-16

Compassion asks to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

-Henri Nouwen

I sit in darkness. I sit in human silence. 
I begin to hear the eloquent night.
The world of this night resounds from 
heaven to hell with animal eloquence, 
with the savage innocence of a million
unknown creatures.
The enormous vitality of their music 
pounds and rings and throbs and echoes
until it gets into everything, and swamps
the whole world in its neutral madness.

​-Thomas Merton

My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back
begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that years 
To me released from control.

-U2, Moment of Surrender

Show me where it hurts, God said, and every cell in my body burst into tears before His tender eyes.

​-Rabia of Basra

Now is the time to meet You, God,
Where the night is wonderful,
Where the forest opens out under the moon
And the living things sing terribly
  that only the present is eternal.

-Thomas Merton

Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one.
​
-C.S. Lewis, ​Till We Have Faces

There in the ground His body lay, light of the world by darkness slain;
Then bursting forth in glorious day, up from the grave He rose again.
And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its  grip on me. For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ.

-Keith Getty & Stewart Townend, ​In Christ Alone

There in the ground His body lay, light of the world by darkness slain; 
Then bursting forth in Glorious Day, up from the grave He rose again.
And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its grip on me.
For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ.

-Keith Getty & Stuart Townend, In Christ Alone

​

​This is the difficult road of conversion, the conversion from loneliness into solitude. Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or sent it, we have to protect stand turn it into a fruitful solitude. To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

-Henri Nouwen, Seeds of Hope