2026-08-02 (Iain) Hearts broken open Building Communities of Compassion

2nd August 2026: Everybody has a broken heart but not every heart breaks open: Building Communities of Compassion

I was asked in my selection interview what my vision for the churches I may one day lead was, and my answer was brief: ‘To build communities of compassion.’ It became clear they wanted me to embellish my answer but I repeated - ‘to build communities of compassion.’ They continued to probe so I added: ‘To build Eucharistic Communities of Compassion’. Adding the word Eucharistic seemed to work and they seemed satisfied and moved on. I wasn’t trying to be clever because I believe Jesus’ life’s work boiled down to constantly teaching his disciples and followers how to be a community of compassion and the feeding of the 5000 is a superb example of this:

So what does this mean in practice? Love is not a feeling, a sentiment, or even an emoji, I’m afraid to say. Love is something you do, you live love through acts of kindness and embody it in our lives - this is the trans formative journey Jesus calls us on, to be widening our circle of compassion: For Love cannot be allowed to stay familial, tribal or National. It is a journey requiring a breaking open of the heart: Meister Ekhart said: Out of a broken heart compassion flows - Everybody has a broken heart but not everybody has a heart that breaks open. A heart that breaks open is one that increasingly empathizes with the suffering of others.

The starting point of being a community of Compassion is to have our hearts open to receive love. If we believe God is love and love is the highest expression of God, it means sitting and bathing in God’s love - accepting our belovedness. A healthy spirituality and faith will always have at its core the ability to receive the love of God and increasingly see ourselves as God sees us.

From this foundation of learning to receive God’s love and the love of others, a community of compassion cares and loves others so that other people’s needs matter to us, and it is so easy to become desensitised to others needs, to effectively distance ourselves and become numb - The moment we become numb, desensitised, indifferent we lose part of our humanity but a heart that breaks open refuses to allow that. One reason why we promote the Arts is that Art, poetry, dance, writing has the ability to punch holes through any wall of numbness.




Have you heard of the acronym WCNSF? It means Wounded Child No Surviving Family, coined by medical staff in Gaza. The Question I ask is: What does love look like for this child?: Love looks like brave doctors & medical care workers, who have had their hearts broken open, that risk everything to care for this child; Love looks like activists, who care enough to risk their futures by breaking into arms factories, like Leonardos, in order to stop the production of devices that target children. Love looks like the brave journalists who risk their lives to expose the truth; Love looks like people on flotillas, breaking a naval blockade to deliver vital humanitarian aid. The examples I have given are all from the frontline but love takes the form of writing to our MP; standing outside synod; supporting demonstrations; donating money. Love and a heart that is broken open leads to action. And a heart that is broken open should not be confined to humanity but to nature, to different species and habitats facing extinction and destruction.

Omid Safi, a scholar of Rumi and the Sufi path of Radical Love describing a good starting point for radical love by quoting rather incongruously a 90’s pop song entitled: What is Love: Baby don’t hurt me: Don’t hurt me, don’t bomb me, don’t deprive me of food, don’t take my land.

In our Gospel Jesus, as he always does, chooses the path of radical love by responding to the immediate need in front of him. He is tired, exhausted and grief stricken - having just heard the news of the death of John the Baptist, his forerunner, friend and mentor; a cruel, vicious, needless death. His heart is broken but open. Jesus has compassion on the crowd, healing their sicknesses. Then as evening comes, the disciples tell Jesus to send the crowd away to buy food - an act of distancing - but Jesus says No: You give them something to eat - This is the participatory eschaton I was talking about a few weeks ago - The Kingdom / Queendom of God is here but it requires our participation to bring it about: God without you will not; You without God cannot.

Jesus then asks the disciples what have you got: 5 loaves and 2 fishes, they answer: Jesus says, ‘Bring it to me,’ orders them to sit down, takes the 5 loaves and 2 fishes, and effectively conducts a huge open air Eucharist by looking to heaven - giving thanks, blessing the bread, breaking the bread and sharing the bread. We are then told that all ate and were satisfied and whatever was left over filled 12 baskets.

Clearly multiplication has occurred and a miracle happened but the story is told in such a way that it has profound symbolic significance:

It is a story that closely connects with Jesus' practice of radically inclusive, egalitarian shared meals that crossed social, purity, and status boundaries (eating with tax collectors, sinners, the poor, the unclean) and dramatizes Jesus's vision of a shared table where everyone eats and there's enough for all.

The feeding contrasts the abundant worldview of the Kingdom / Queendom of God against the scarcity worldview of the world, starting with the conviction that there is enough food for everybody in God’s Creation and hunger is not natural or inevitable but the product of unjust systems of distribution and hoarding, rather than justly shared. (The wealthiest 0.001 percent, a group representing around 56,000 multi-millionaires, now hold three times more wealth than the bottom half of the world population, according to the 2026 World Inequality Report. )

The story emphasises communal participation, over solitary miracle - working, emphasizing that Jesus doesn't act alone: the disciples participate and distribute the food, modelling the vision central to liberation theology and development of base communities in Latin America: the church as a community that organizes itself around the material needs of the poor, mediating Christ's provision through concrete communal action rather than charity handed down from above. The feeding of the 5,000 is a call for praxis: to feed the hungry.

The eucharistic echoes in the narrative (took, blessed, broke, gave) point to the Eucharist, the central part of our weekly worship, as not just being a private sacrament of individual grace and piety but as a template for communal solidarity and economic practice of real bread sharing outside the Liturgy.

This table is a vision of heaven on earth: a place where all are welcome, none shall be turned away; and none shall go hungry, all will have enough to have dignity, agency and life. And it is our mandate to bring this vision into the world: to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of God's favor.

We should aspire to increasingly be a Eucharistic Community of Compassion. Amen