Wounds

This was a speech from that Goalcast Facebook page. Here are excerpts from a speech by Greg Boyle from the University of Notre Dame.

Then he stopped speaking, so overwhelmed with emotion, and he seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could see. When he could regain his speech he said through his tears, "I wore three t-shirts well into my adult years because I was ashamed of my wounds. I didn't want anybody to see 'em but now I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my scars. My wounds are my friends. After all, how can I help the wounded if I don't welcome my own wounds?"

The measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margin, but only in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them. You have to brace yourselves because people will accuse you of wasting your time.

You stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless, you stand with those whose dignity has been denied. You stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear, and you will go from here and have this exquisite privilege once in a while to be able to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out, with the demonized, so that the demonizing will stop.

The gentle kind soul, he is proof that only the soul that ventilates the world with tenderness has any chance of changing the world.