[…] What he understood is the difference between charity and community — a difference founded in kinship, in recognizing that we all fall down, that sometimes it takes another hand to pull us up again. “All you have to do,” he once told the novelist Ann Patchett, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” ….
What Father Strobel understood is that compassion is the only thing that can save us.
— Margaret Renkl, from “Proof That One Life Can Change the World” (The New York Times · August 14, 2023)
Don’t miss rest of Margaret Renkl’s Opinion essay here.
Photo credit.