Guercino. The Woman Taken in Adultery. Dulwich Picture Gallery. London
Mercy never began to be, but from eternity has always been and will never cease to be. Forever God’s Mercy stands a boundless, overwhelming immensity of divine compassion. It is the infinite goodness of God confronting human suffering, sorrow, and shame. Love reaches down to us in the lowest part of our need. Like a rose waiting to bloom, our hearts can only open when we feel the warm light of mercy touching our being.
To appropriate precious mercy, we must first believe that God understands us mercifully and then commit to the inner work of becoming merciful to others. Both are difficult because the old voices in our heads continue to convince us that others are the problem and God can’t possibly love them or us as we are. We define ourselves and others by our worst moments. People are in pain and are not who they appear to be to us. We focus on their flaws and don’t see their broken hearts beneath their awful behavior because we don’t see our own. We are miserably comfortable casting stones at others because we cast them first at ourselves. But God does not see as we see. Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.1The sublime truth is that we are all connected, and each of us completes God in some mysterious way. We are not to judge how but to trust and allow only goodness and mercy into our hearts.
How patiently, intimately, and mercifully He knows and walks with us, slowly lifting the veil to teach us to trust what lies beneath. To become merciful, we must ponder our own inner space. Is it fearful and filled with resentment about our own lives and the lives of those we are condemning? Do we give space to unmerciful voices that demean and judge others in a subtle effort to shore up our inadequacy? Our external failings and the failings of others do not inhibit God’s mercy but rather summon its healing power. As we choose to tenaciously hold ourselves and others within the mercying love of God, we free ourselves from the clutter of old voices and open a space in our hearts large enough to embrace the whole world.
When we defend ourselves, define another person or situation, or deny our culpability, we cease to see things as they really are. A situation that we label as terrible is, in reality, to be used in some mysterious way for our good. We might label a woman a snob because she is too beautiful or successful, so we never see her heart. A child might be giving us a difficult time, so we label him ‘a problem child’ and relate to him from that place, never seeing his heart or our part in the problem. That child belongs to God. We need to trust Him to be as creative with others as He has been with us. We get so caught up in competing, comparing, and controlling that there is no hope of love. Only those who have confronted their pride and come to merciful humility fully experience harmony in relationship with God, with others, and with self. Such harmony then opens an infinite vastness for others to move about freely in. Remember that love always takes the initiative. Love affirms and honors the dignity of each human soul. Love feels no power or superiority in the humiliation and desecration of another fellow sufferer. Jesus was unjustly condemned by the mob, but He didn’t defend Himself. He kept silent, and His silence enabled a far greater good. Stretched out on the cross, He turned toward the universe with utter forgiveness. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”2
The Hidden Life Awakened p 128.
With eyes of faith, we begin to see all of life embraced by a God Whose name is mercy, always ready to change our failings and brokenness into a capacity for deepened compassion. It is mercy that opens us to embrace the wounded world with hearts mercied by the fathomless love of God. Our world desperately needs us to create a warm and generous space that does not judge or condemn but is open and accessible, ready to meet others where they are in love, trusting God’s goodness to heal them in God’s time. Thus we fulfill Jesus’ command to be merciful even as God is merciful.3 Might we choose to let God’s mercying love enclose, encompass, and wind us ever upward, forever living in the mercy.