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Good morning.

The people I most admire are usually the ones who are able to combine those two most vital human virtues of wisdom and compassion. In fact, I suspect they are the ones who are able to show how these two things are inseparable: we are wise when our hearts and minds are open to others.

For me the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, has been a constant source of inspiration in this way of openness. In his long prose poem, Hagia Sophia, He wrote this:

Sophia is the mercy of God in us. She is the tenderness with which the infinitely mysterious power of pardon turns the darkness of our sins into the light of grace. She is the inexhaustible fountain of kindness, and would almost seem to be, in herself, all mercy.

‘The inexhaustible fountain of kindness.’ Wisdom and compassion belong together because each is an expression of our truest self. We are wise when our ears are open to listen, we are compassionate when that listening hears the cries of the world. We are wise when our minds are open to new understandings, we are compassionate when we understand our neighbour as one like ourselves. Kindness is not a superpower only available to the few, but our natural state which is made real in us when we let go of anything that suppresses it: greed, ignorance, hatred.  Mercy is our capacity to forgive that lies in each of us and is awakened when we accept that we are forgiven.

Holy Wisdom of God,

Reveal in us our true nature of compassion and mercy.

Take from us all that clouds our vision

and open our eyes to your loving mercy,

invisibly at work in all things.

Teach us to respond in compassion to those we meet today,

All those whose cries you hear in loving care.

Amen.