“In order to gain possession of ourselves, we have to have some confidence, some hope of victory,” wrote the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. “And in order to keep that hope alive we must usually have some taste of victory.”[5] The compassion of possibility, I would say, is a door we keep open so we can see that victory coming. If we didn’t mistake ourselves or one another for whatever personality features and behavioral traits appear on the surface, “good” or “bad,” if in each person we could sense the potential for wholeness that can never be lost, that would be, for us all, a victory worth
...more
