Celebrating WIHW: Compassion in a New Light

SiVIC Interreligious Leaders Forum

Garth Pickett speaks on compassion

by Sari Heidenreich, Regional Coordinator for North America at URI (SiVIC is a Cooperating Circle of URI)

There are special moments in life when things just click, when something you thought you knew takes on new life.

That happened for me yesterday with compassion.

It’s not that before yesterday I didn’t think compassion was important — or that I didn’t seek to practice it everyday. On the contrary, I was doing both of those things. But yesterday, sitting around a table with 25 people, all seeking to understand the role of compassion in their religion and spiritual journey, my understanding of compassion ballooned.

Garth Pickett, a board member of the URI Cooperation Circle Silicon Valley Interreligious Council (SiVIC) and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, shared with the group that, in the Bible, the word compassion is mostly used to describe a feeling while compassion in action is charity.

  As someone raised in the Christian tradition, this set off about a hundred light bulbs in my brain. Charity — that is the word used in that most famous and central of Bible passages — 1 Corinthians 13.

Read more at United Religions Initiative