Compass Tattoo Quotes

Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

Kindness is the only strength there is.

Close both eyes see with the other one. Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments our ceaseless withholding our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new expansive location in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.

Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness.

Kinship– not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not “a man for others”; he was one with them. There is a world of difference in that.

God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in disapproval.

Compassion isn't just about feeling the pain of others; it's about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. 'Be compassionate as God is compassionate,' means the dismantling of barriers that exclude.

Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified — whichever came first.

There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love.

God can get tiny, if we're not careful.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a covenant between equals. Al Sharpton always says, "We're all created equal, but we don't all end up equal.

It's my first day teaching," I say to her, "Give me some advice." "Two things," she says, "One: know all their names by tomorrow. Two: It's more important that they know you than that they know what you know.

You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.

The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.

The poet Rumi writes, 'Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.

No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

Pema Chodron, an ordained Buddhist nun, writes of compassion and suggests that its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.

Resilience is born by grounding yourself in your own loveliness, hitting notes you thought were way out of your range.

The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can't take His eyes off of you. Marinate in the vastness of that.

The self cannot survive without love, and the self, starved of love, dies. The absence of self-love is shame, "just as cold is the absence of warmth." Disgrace obscuring the son... Franciscan Richard Rohr writes that "the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves.

Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” I like even more what Jesus doesn’t say. He does not say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.

How much greater is the God we have than the one we think we have.

See this ring? It means I belong to him. And the tattoo of my name on his arm means he belongs to me. All of him. His dick is a compass, and I'm due north- it only points to me.

Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills in this way: we've just "forgotten that we belong to each other." Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen.

Terror melting into wonder, then slipping into peace.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote that we must "trust in the slow work of God." Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.

It is an essential tenet of Buddhism that we can begin to change the world by first changing how we look at the world.

We constantly lived in the paradox of precariousness. The money was never there when you needed it, and it was always on time.

You don't really keep vigil; it keeps you-suspended in awkward silence and dead air-desperate for anything at all to stir some hope out of these murky waters and make things vital again.

The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be some lives out there that matter less than other lives.

Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one's actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself.

The poet Kabir asks, "What is God?" Then he answers his own question: "God is the breath inside the breath.

Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God’s DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment.

Scripture scholars contend that the original language of the Beatitudes should not be rendered as "Blessed are the single-hearted" or "Blessed are the peacemakers" or "Blessed are those who struggle for justice." Greater precision in translation would say, "You're in the right place if...you are single-hearted or work for peace." The Beatitudes is not a spirituality, after all. It's a geography. It tells us where to stand.

Jesus was not a man for others. He was one with others. There is a world of difference in that. Jesus didn't seek the rights of lepers. He touched the leper even before he got around to curing him. He didn't champion the cause of the outcast. He was the outcast. He didn't fight for improved conditions for the prisoner. He simply said, 'I was in prison.' The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.

Can we stay faithful and persistent in our fidelity even when things seem not to succeed? I suppose Jesus could have chosen a strategy that worked better (evidence-based outcomes) — that didn't end in the Cross — but he couldn't find a strategy more soaked with fidelity that the one he embraced

The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place--with the outcast and those relegated to the margins.

Part of the spirit dies a little each time its asked to carry more than its weight in terror, violence, and betrayal.

On most days, if I'm true to myself, I just want to share my life with the poor, regardless of result. I want to lean into the challenge of intractable problems with as tender a heart as I can locate, knowing that there is some divine ingenuity here, "the slow work of God," that gets done if we're faithful.

There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love. Ruskin's comment that you can get someone to remove his coat more surely with a warm, gentle sun than with a cold, blistering wind is particularly apt.

Compassion isn't just about feeling the pain of others; it's about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. 'Be compassionate as God is compassionate,' means the dismantling of barriers that exclude. In Scripture, Jesus is in a house so packed that no one can come through the door anymore. So the people open the roof and lower this paralytic down through it, so Jesus can heal him. The focus of the story is, understandably, the healing of the paralytic. But there is something more significant than that happening here. They're ripping the roof off the place, and those outside are being let in.

The principle suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. It is a toxic shame -- a global sense of failure of the whole self. This shame can seep so deep down... To this end, one hopes (against all human inclination) to model not the "one false move" God but the "no matter whatness" of God. You seek to imitate the kind of God you believe in, where disappointment is, well, Greek to Him. You strive to live the black spiritual that says, "God looks beyond our fault and sees our need.

Mother Teresa’s take: “We are not called to be successful, but faithful.

It is certainly true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter—even if that chapter is twenty years long.

I steep in the utter fullness of not wanting to have anyone else's life but my own.

St. Paul challenges us to "dedicate ourselves to thankfulness" and so I will.

We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.

Jesus says, "You are the light of the world." I like even more what Jesus doesn't say. He does not say, "One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you'll be light." He doesn't say, "If you play by the rules, cross your T's and dot your I's, then maybe you'll become light." No. He says, straight out, "You are light." It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God's sake, don't move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.

The night following the reading, Gansey woke up to a completely unfamiliar sound and fumbled for his glasses. It sounded a little like one of his roommates was being killed by a possum, or possibly the final moments of a fatal cat fight. He wasn’t certain of the specifics, but he was sure death was involved. Noah stood in the doorway to his room, his face pathetic and long-suffering. “Make it stop,” he said. Ronan’s room was sacred, and yet here Gansey was, twice in the same weak, pushing the door open. He found the lamp on and Ronan hunched on the bed, wearing only boxers. Six months before, Ronan had gotten the intricate black tattoo that covered most of his back and snaked up his neck, and now the monochromatic lines of it were stark in the claustrophobic lamplight, more real than anything else in the room. It was a peculiar tattoo, both vicious and lovely, and every time Gansey saw it, he saw something different in the pattern. Tonight, nestled in an inked glen of wicked, beautiful flowers, was a beak where before he’d seen a scythe. The ragged sound cut through the apartment again. “What fresh hell is this?” Gansey asked pleasantly. Ronan was wearing headphones as usual, so Gansey stretched forward far enough to tug them down around his neck. Music wailed faintly into the air. Ronan lifted his head. As he did, the wicked flowers on his back shifted and hid behind his sharp shoulder blades. In his lap was the half-formed raven, its head tilted back, beak agape. “I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand. “I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping.” Ronan shrugged. “Perhaps for you.” “Not tonight. Your pterodactyl woke me. Why is it making that sound?” In response, Ronan dipped the tweezers into a plastic baggy on the blanket in front of him. Gansey wasn’t certain he wanted to know what the gray substance was in the tweezers’ grasp. As soon as the raven heard the rustle of the bag, it made the ghastly sound again—a rasping squeal that became a gurgle as it slurped down the offering. At once, it inspired both Gansey’s compassion and his gag reflex. “Well, this is not going to do,” he said. “You’re going to have to make it stop.” “She has to be fed,” Ronan replied. The ravel gargled down another bite. This time it sounded a lot like vacuuming potato salad. “It’s only every two hours for the first six weeks.” “Can’t you keep her downstairs?” In reply, Ronan half-lifted the little bird toward him. “You tell me.

Jesus, in Matthew's gospel, says, "How narrow is the gate that leads to life." Mistakenly, I think, we've come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But really it wants us to see that narrowness is the way... It's about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. it is about an entry into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you're a son/daughter worth having. We see our plentitude in God's own expansive view of us.

Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. I'm not opposed to success; I just think we should accept it only if it is a by-product of our fidelity. If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.

To embrace the strategy of Jesus is to be engaged in what Dean Brackley calls "downward mobility." Our locating ourselves with those who have been endlessly excluded becomes an act of visible protest. For no amount of our screaming at the people in charge to change things can change them. The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them. The trickle-down theory doesn't really work here. The powers bent on waging war against the poor and the young and the "other" will only be moved to kinship when they observe it. Only when we can see a community where the outcast is valued and appreciated will we abandon the values that seek to exclude.

How, then, to imagine, the expansive heart of this God—greater than God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God when all God longs for is this solidarity with us. In Spanish, when you speak of your great friend, you describe the union and kinship as being de uña y mugre—our friendship is like the fingernail and the dirt under it. Our image of who God is and what’s on God’s mind is more tiny than it is troubled. It trips more on our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or theological considerations. The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity.

Ours is a God who waits. Who are we not to? It takes what it takes for the great turnaround. Wait for it.

If our primary concern is results, we will choose to work only with those who give us good ones.

This was to be their place- outside of communion- forever. Maybe we call this the opposite of God.

Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified—whichever came first.

The Ancient Desert Fathers, when they were disconsolate and without hope, would repeat one word, over and over, as a kind of soothing mantra. And the word wasn't "Jesus" or "God" or "Love." The word was "Today." It kept them where they needed to be.

Pema Chödrön, an ordained Buddhist nun, writes of compassion and suggests that its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.

People always ask me, "What kind of people make it through Hell Week?" I don't really have an answer to that. I do know-- generally-- who won't make it through Hell Week. The weightlifting meatheads who think the size of their biceps indicates their strength: they usually fail. The kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are: they usually fail. The preening leaders who don't want to be dirty: they usually fail. The "me first, look at me, I'm the best" former athletes who've always been told they're stars: they usually fail. The blowhards who have a thousand stories about what they're going to do but a thin record of what they've actually done: they usually fail. The whiners, the "this is not fair" guys: they usually fail.

Everyone is just looking to be told that who he or she is is right and true and wholly acceptable. No need to tinker and tweak. Exactly right.

If you can't fix it, feature it.

Sometimes, it only seems that the hurt wins.

I find consolation in a no doubt apocryphal story of Pope John XXIII. Apparently at night he'd pray: "I've done everything I can today for your church. But it's your Church, and I'm going to bed.

The tattoo Ty now had on his ring finger was the simple wrapped infinity symbol Zane had drawn, but when he moved his middle finger, it revealed an anchor woven in. A hidden reminder of what Zane was to him. Zane’s was the exact same thing, only with a simplified compass incorporated in. Zane

Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, "I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you're talking to, the one right in front of you." I mantra I use often, to keep me focused in delight on the person in front of me, comes from an unlikely place. Richard Rolheiser writes that, "the opposite of depression is not happiness, it's delight." After all, we breathe in the Spirit that delights in our being. We don't breathe in the Spirit that just sort of puts up with our mess. It's about delight.

Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God’s DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment.

Close both eyes; see with the other one. Then, we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments, our ceaseless withholding, our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened, and we find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, in a new, expansive location, in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love. We’ve wandered into God’s own

If you read Scripture scholar Marcus Borg and go to the index in search of 'sinner,' it'll say, 'see outcast.' This was a social grouping of people who felt wholly unacceptable. The world had deemed them disgraceful and shameful, and this toxic shame, as I have mentioned before, was brought inside and given a home in the outcast. Jesus' strategy is a simple one: He eats with them. Precisely to those paralyzed in this toxic shame, Jesus says, 'I will eat with you.' He goes where love has not yet arrived, and he 'gets his grub on.' Eating with outcasts rendered them acceptable.

People want me to tell them success stories. I understand this. They are the stories you want to tell, after all. So why does my scalp tighten whenever I am asked this? Surely, part of it comes from my being utterly convinced I’m a fraud. I

Out of the wreck of our disfigured, misshapen selves, so darkened by shame and disgrace, indeed the Lord comes to us disguised as ourselves. And we don't grow into this—we just learn to pay better attention. The 'no matter whatness' of God dissolves the toxicity of shame and fills us with tender mercy. Favorable, finally, and called by name—by the one your mom uses when she's not pissed off.

They say that an educated inmate will not reoffend. This is not because an education assures that this guy will get hired somewhere. It is because his view is larger and more educated, so that he can be rejected at ninety-three job interviews and still not give up. He's acquired resilience.

Salivating for success keeps you from being faithful, keeps you from truly seeing whoever's sitting in front of you. Embracing a strategy and an approach you can believe in is sometimes the best you can do on any given day. If you surrender your need for results and outcomes, success becomes God's business.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

Not only does God think we’re firme, it is God’s joy to have us marinate in that.

When you fill my heart, my eyes overflow.

[T]he principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace.

This way will not pass again, and so there is a duty to be mindful of that which delights and keeps joy at the center, distilled from all that happens to us in a day.

Pope John XXIII. Apparently, at night he’d pray: “I’ve done everything I can today for your church. But it’s Your church, and I’m going to bed.” Before,

It’s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart. —Denise Levertov

Apparently, FDR had a sign on his desk that read: "Let unconquerable gladness dwell." Our search to know what's on God's mind ends in the discovery of this same unconquerable gladness.

This is a chapter on God, I guess. Truth be told, the whole book is. Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God. Certainly, a place like Homeboy Industries is all folly and bad business unless the core of the endeavor seeks to imitate the kind of God one ought to believe in. In the end, I am helpless to explain why anyone would accompany those on the margins were it not for some anchored belief that the Ground of all Being thought this was a good idea.

There is a longing in us all to be God-enthralled. So enthralled that to those hunkered down in their disgrace, in the shadow of death, we become transparent messengers of God's own tender mercy. We want to be seized by that same tenderness; we want to bear the largeness of God. (p45)

Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, “I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you’re talking to, the one right in front of you.

What is the delivery system for resilience? In part, it's the loving, caring adult who pays attention. It's the community of unconditional love, representing the very "no matter whatness" of God. They say that an educated inmate will not reoffend. This is not because an education assures that this guy will get hired somewhere. It is because his view is larger and more educated, so that he can be rejected at ninety-three job interviews and still not give up. he's acquired resilience. Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakable goodness. Poet Galway Kinnell writes, "Sometimes it's necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals. Al Sharpton always says, “We’re all created equal, but we don’t all end up equal.” Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship.

Thomas Merton writes, "No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there...We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance." The cosmic dance is simply always happening, and you'll want to be there when it happens. For it is there in the birth of your first child, in roundhouse bagging, in watching your crew eat, in an owl's surprising appearance, and in a "digested" frog. Rascally inventions of holiness abounding--today, awaiting the attention of our delight. Yes, yes, yes. God so love the world that He thought we'd find the poetry in it. Music. Nothing playing.

you have no choice but to consider that "God loves me," yet you spend much of your life unable to shake off what feels like God only embracing you begrudgingly and reluctantly. I suppose, if you insist, God has to love me too. Then who can explain this next moment, when the utter fullness of God rushes in on you-- when you completely know the One in whom "you move and live and have your being," as St. Paul writes. You see, then, that it has been God's joy to love you all along. And this is completely new. (p25)

You read The Idiot, right? Right. Well, ‘Idiot’ was very disturbing book to me. In fact it was so disturbing I have never really read very many fictions after, apart from Dragon Tattoo kind of thing. Because”—I was trying to interject—“well, maybe you can tell me about that later, what you thought, but let me tell you why I found it disturbing. Because all Myshkin ever did was good… unselfish… he treated all persons with understanding and compassion and what resulted from this goodness? Murder! Disaster! I used to worry about this a lot. Lie awake at night and worry! Because—why? How could this be? I read that book like three times, thinking I wasn’t understanding right. Myshkin was kind, loved everyone, he was tender, always forgave, he never did a wrong thing—but he trusted all the wrong people, made all bad decisions, hurt everyone around him. Very dark message to this book. ‘Why be good.’ But—this is what took hold on me last night, riding here in the car. What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

Well—Bible school, Poland, it was a long time ago. Still. Because, what I am trying to say—what I was thinking in the car from Antwerp last night—good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions. Scary idea! Remember Prince Myshkin in The Idiot?” “I’m not really up for an intellectual talk right now.” “I know, I know, but hear me out. You read The Idiot, right? Right. Well, ‘Idiot’ was very disturbing book to me. In fact it was so disturbing I have never really read very many fictions after, apart from Dragon Tattoo kind of thing. Because”—I was trying to interject—“well, maybe you can tell me about that later, what you thought, but let me tell you why I found it disturbing. Because all Myshkin ever did was good… unselfish… he treated all persons with understanding and compassion and what resulted from this goodness? Murder! Disaster! I used to worry about this a lot. Lie awake at night and worry! Because—why? How could this be? I read that book like three times, thinking I wasn’t understanding right. Myshkin was kind, loved everyone, he was tender, always forgave, he never did a wrong thing—but he trusted all the wrong people, made all bad decisions, hurt everyone around him. Very dark message to this book. ‘Why be good.’ But—this is what took hold on me last night, riding here in the car. What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

The tattoo Ty now had on his ring finger was the simple wrapped infinity symbol Zane had drawn, but when he moved his middle finger, it revealed an anchor woven in. A hidden reminder of what Zane was to him. Zane’s was the exact same thing, only with a simplified compass incorporated in.

You are light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.

William Blake wrote, “We are put on earth for a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.

Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, says, “How narrow is the gate that leads to life.” Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way.

One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.” He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No. He says, straight out, “You are light.” It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it.

And so the voices at the margins get heard and the circle of compassion widens. Souls feeling their worth, refusing to forget that we belong to each other.

We all just want to be called by the name our mom uses when she's not pissed off at us.

Compassion isn’t just about feeling the pain of others; it’s about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. “Be compassionate as God is compassionate,” means the dismantling of barriers that exclude.

If you surrender your need for results and outcomes, success becomes God’s business.