Learning Compassion

“If we want to set our lives right and find peace,
it is not the tolerant attitude of others
that will do it for us.
It will come about, rather, by our learning
how to show compassion to them.
If we try to avoid this hard struggle of compassion,
by preferring a withdrawn and solitary life,
we will simply drag our unhealed obsessions
into solitude with us.
We might well have hidden them.
We certainly will not have eliminated them.
I f we do not seek liberation from our obsessions,
then becoming more withdrawn and less social
may even make us more blind to them,
since it can mask them.”

St. John Cassian