Is there a difference between Divine Love and Divine Compassion?
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Browse any modern-day book on spirituality and it'll be filled with the word 'love'. We are to love ourselves, love our neighbors, love those who we find challenging, etc. Yet love is the one word that is missing from the spiritual story of 'The Young Man and The Old Man'.
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Why?
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Eskimos have seventeen different words for snow because snow makes up a huge part of their lives. Greeks have seven different words for love. Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, has 96 different words for love. Even in Aramaic, Jesus' native tongue, there are two different words for love. Yet the English language is quite poor in the area of love. i love my wife, i love my step-daughter, i love my bowling buddies, i love dark chocolate. In Greek and Sanskrit there would be a different word for every instance of 'love' in the previous sentence.
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When Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself", and "Love your enemy", the Greek word used is 'agape'. A definition of agape is 'loving-kindness' or 'human-kindness', similar to the Pali word 'metta', Pali being the language used in some ancient Buddhist scriptures.
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The problem is that the word agape, metta or even loving-kindness did not quite sound right coming from the Old Man in 'The Young Man and The Old Man'. So, instead of the word love, i used a word that i found in much of the Buddhist literature that i was reading at that time that really resonated with me: compassion.
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So although 'The Young Man and The Old Man' might be missing the word 'love', it is filled with compassion. For as the Old Man eruditely informs us, God's compassion is indefinable: "ONE's compassion is much greater than we, as common people, can even comprehend!"
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Blog post by vic smyth:?
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#inspirationalfiction #mystical #spiritual #compassion #divinelove?
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