Contemplation breaks us open to ourselves. “The nearer we draw to God,” Abba Mateos said, “the more we see ourselves as sinners.” We see ourselves as we really are and, knowing ourselves we cannot condemn the other. We remember with a blush the public sin that made us mortal. We recognize with dismay the private sin that curls within us in fear of exposure. Then the whole world changes when we know ourselves. We gentle it. The fruit of self-knowledge is kindness. Broken ourselves, we bind tenderly the wounds of the other.

The most telling measure of the meaning of kindness in life is memories of unkindness in our own: scenes from a childhood marked by the cruelty of other children, recollections of disdain that scarred the heart, moments of scorn or rejection that leave a person feeling marginalized in the human community. In those moments of isolation, we remember the impact of the fracturing of hope. We feel again the pain that comes with the assault on that sliver of dignity that refuses to die in us, however much the degradation of the moment. It is then that we come to understand that kindness, compassion, understanding, acceptance are the irrefutable marks of holiness because we ourselves have known—or perhaps have never known—the balm of kindness for which we so desperately thirsted in those situations. Kindness is an act of God that makes the dry dust of rejection digestible to the human psyche.

Those who have touched the God within themselves, with all their struggles, all their lack, see God everywhere and, most of all, in the helpless, fragile, frightened other.

To be a contemplative it is necessary to take in without reservation those whom the world casts out because it is they who show us most clearly the face of the waiting God.

—from Illuminated Life by Joan Chittister (Orbis)