Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St.Francis

*Advance Praise & Reviews* "Ilia Delio leads us on our quest for an authentic inner compass, challenging us to action and to be 'doers of the Word." --Margaret Carney, O.S.F., president, St. Bonaventure University “The key to Francis’s transformation into love, his secret of making wholes out of the scattered fragments of life, was compassion. He learned compassion as the art of healing broken hearts by collecting the tears of the forgotten, the frightened, and the lonely in his hands and holding the wounded as his kin. Francis entered the world of the stranger and made the stranger into a brother. He learned to love what was weak and fragile, and he learned to care for what the world discarded.”—From the Introduction What is compassion and how does it emerge in the human heart? What moves us to compassion? Can we learn compassion as a way of life? Can we let go of our fears to love more deeply? These are some of the questions that guide this brief and inspiring book. Compassion traces the life of St. Francis, his growth from a selfish, materialistic young man to the humble, holy saint beloved by millions. With this book as your guide, you can do simple things every day to discover a more compassionate, open, fearless, and loving life—just as Francis did, in a time not so unlike our own. Ilia Delio, a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, is retired professor of theology at Villanova University, and founder and executive director of the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture. Her many books include The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole; The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love; and The Humility of God: A Franciscan Perspective, all from Orbis Books.