Chapter 5: The Compassionate Christ in the Classroom: Ignatian Spiritual Reading

My first experience of Buddhist meditation occurred at an American Academy of Religion conference during a session of the Contemplative Studies Group,¹ where a Buddhist scholar guided about sixty of us through a “compassion meditation.”² Toward the end of his paper, the presenter invited us to select a compassion figure from our lives and to sit with this person—or even a pet animal, if a person could not be found—in our mind’s eye. Determined to honor the practice and not slide into Christian prayer, I chose my mother who, throughout my life, had been the source of the deepest unconditional love I had received from any human being. Waves of compassion washed over me, and my soul expanded with her love. And then, unwelcomed and uninvited, Christ came rushing into my imagination, because I had experienced in him a compassion and love that infinitely outweighed the greatest love my mother could give me. Embarrassed at first by his appearance, I could no longer hide that Christ was to me a fountain of compassion and kindness; so I chose to stop suppressing this wellspring of love in my life.³