compassion

Have a compassionate heart towards all creatures.

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of intergrity.

Grace Give me the grace to care without neglecting my needs, The humility to assist without rescuing, The kindness to be clear without being cold, The mercy to be angry without rejecting, The prudence to disclose without disrespecting my privacy, The humor to admit human failings without experiencing shame, The compassion to give freely without giving myself away.

True benevolence, or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.

Unbounded courage and compassion join'd, Tempering each other in the victor's mind, Alternately proclaim him good and great, And make the hero and the man complete.

Smith's first report of his salvation at the hands of Pocahontas evidently occurs in a 1616 letter to Queen Anne, written to notify the Crown of his debt to the Indian princess "before she [Pocahontas] arrived at London. . . . "(John Smith, The General History of Virginia) Pocahontas disembarked at Plymouth, England with her husband, John Rolfe, on June 31, 1616, to become the first Indian woman ever to visit Britain. Her subsequent success with the royal court is well-known. "That some ten yeeres agoe being in Virginia, and taken prisoner by the power of Powhatan their chiefe king, I received from this great Salvage exceeding great courtesie, especially from his sonne Nantaquaus . . . and his sister Pocahontas, the kings most deare and wel-beloved daughter, being but a childe of twelve or thirteen yeeres of age, whose compassionate pitifull heart, of my desperate estate, gave me much cause to respect her: I being the first Christian this proud king and his grim attendants ever saw: and thus inthralled in their barbarous power, I cannot say I felt the least occasion of want that was in the power of those my mortall foes to prevent, notwithstanding al their threats. After some six weeks fatting amongst those Salvage Courtiers, at the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her owne braines to save mine, and not onely that, but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to James towne..."

All I want is the same thing you want. To have a nation with a government that is as good and honest and decent and competent and compassionate and as filled with love as are the American people.

Sir William Blackstone, the great English jurist, writing in his Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1769, was most explicit in emphasizing the weakness of man's nature. As he observed: ". . . if our reason were always, as in our first ancestor before his transgression, clear and perfect,unruffled by passions, unclouded by prejudice, unimpaired by disease or intemperance, the task would be pleasant and easy; we should need no other guide but this. But every man now finds the contrary in his own experience; that his reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error. This has given manifold occasion for the benign interposition of divine Providence, which in compassion to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, hath been pleased at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce its laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law . . ."

The covenant of your servanthood is that you be a servant to God, not to someone else, and that you know that everything except God is a servant to God, as He Most High has said, "There is none in the heaven and the earth but cometh unto the Compassionate as a servant."

Encompass with your mercy and compassion all animals and creatures. Do not say, "this is inanimate and has no awareness." Indeed, it does; it is you yourself who have no awareness! So let existence be as it is, and be merciful towards it with the mercifulness of the Creator in the midst of His creation.