Like St Francis, Sergius was a friend to birds and wild animals. There is a story that tells how he regularly fed a bear that came near to his hut. Of there was not enough bread for the two of them, he gave his portion to the bear, because, he said, 'the bear does not understand about fasting'.
Perhaps Thomas Aquinas was not so far off when he claimed, “No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers.” I take this less as a mandate for medieval masochism than an indecorous call to embrace our own authentic experience. If we’re not at home with the depth of our feelings, we’re likely to skirt the deep feelings of others.There are links to on-line texts of Aquinas here, but the quote doesn't not resolve to one of these sources; the translation doesn't seem to be on-line.
Marcus Borg has written a widely helpful book about the need for Christians to retrieve the correct understanding of Jesus, which, he claims, would be a much more appealing picture of Jesus. He titled the book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I think the same can be said about the need many Christians feel to retrieve their mystical traditions: they need to become mystics again for the first time. Karl Rahner, one of the most respected Catholic theologians of the past century (and my teacher!), recognized this in a statement that has been repeated broadly: “In the future Christians will be mystics, or they will not be anything.”
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When Buddha refused to talk about God in order to make way for the experience of Enlightenment, he was making the same point, but even more forcefully, that Rahner was getting at in his insistence that Christians must be mystics: “God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own. . . .
To put this more in our contemporary context, Buddha has reminded me and all of us Christians that any kind of religious life or church membership must be based on one’s own personal experience. It is not enough to say “amen” to a creed, or obey carefully a law, or attend regularly a liturgy. The required personal experience may be mediated through a community or church, but it has to be one’s own. Without such a personal, mystical happening, once cannot authentically and honestly call oneself religious.
“Belief in God has not gone away, no matter how secular society has become or how much effort reductionist science has exerted to banish Him,” she says. “God has not gone away because people keep encountering Him, in unexplainable, intensely spiritual moments.”