Finding mercy

'We marry to find mercy,' said someone... I forget... (Anyone?) 

How true.

In Christian marriage, spouses deliberately and expressly vow to support each other in all circumstances which implicitly means that each will be unfailingly merciful to the other, for their whole lives. They promise to forgive each other everything before any hurt is done, the concomitant being that they will not abuse each other's promise to be merciful.

What a promise. Such amazing generosity. For the sake of love, each gives the other the most colossal blank cheque, a cheque which will never, by the grace of God, be cancelled because of hurts and faults which will be met only with mercy. Tough going ahead, then, with pain, perhaps almost unbearable, and self-giving till it hurts and yet, in that knowledge, a promise of open-ended mercy.

What wonderful reassurance, what security for the frail, corruptible people who are marrying. This is the Divinity at work through human agency: unconditional love and mercy, in imitation of Christ.

Dominican religious vows echo this marital vow. At Profession, the novice, asked by the superior, 'What do you seek?' replies, 'God's mercy and yours.' The brother or sister is asking the brethren and sisters of the Order to be to him or her as husband and wife are to each other: loving, supportive channels of the mercy of God.

Mercy. Such a beautiful attribute of our all-powerful, all-just God who sees our petty venality, our selfishness, our downright evil-doing. Where we in our 'justice' inflict punishment and exact retribution, God offers mercy. His only asking-price is our acceptance of it. That, actually, can be expensive: it costs us all the pride we have. It means acknowledging our radical dependence on Him.

To offer mercy in the face of selfish sin, of harm inflicted on others by heartlessness or crime and even in the face of plain evil, is beyond our comprehension. We are simply not capable of it. It is not in human nature. We are programmed for competition promoting our survival and so we are corruptible. But God has no competitors and is incorruptible. God alone is capable of absolute mercy, if He wills to be merciful.

And He does will it. Christ reveals this to us.

My favourite prayer (as will become clear as this blog winds through the years ahead, DV) is the Benedictus, and my favourite lines are:

As for you, little child, you shall... give his people knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of all their sins, the lovingkindness of the heart of our God who visits us like the dawn from on high.

How gently our all-powerful God visits us, arriving, like the dawn, almost imperceptibly, in human form, as an infant, so that we might not be frightened by His might, but apprehend something of His gentle, merciful, loving nature in terms familiar to us.

And how does He accomplish our salvation? And salvation from what?

Salvation from ourselves, from our corruptibility, from actual corruption, from our hardness of heart, from our recidivist selfishness, from our abuse of our fellow men and women, from our withholding from those around us what we have been freely given, from our contentment with shallow pleasures when we are made for glorious things.

Salvation through the forgiveness of all their sins.

I look at those who acknowledge no God, no authority over themselves, vehemently asserting that they are the sole arbiters of 'their morality' and creators of their own destiny. They acknowledge no objective moral law but will bow only to what is, in their analysis, inevitable or expedient.

Such a person, however much he asserts that he is a superman, is, sadly for him, merely human and prey to human woes. Master of the Universe by day, at night he will lie awake, sleepless in the small hours, his guts gnawed by doubt, and aching (although he will of course deny it) for reassurance that he is loved and that his sins (though he denies the very concept) are forgiven. He is human and therefore has a conscience. What he longs for, this self-sufficient master of his own fate, though he does not know its name, is mercy.

And if he but knew it, in Christ he is offered the mercy which his deepest, authentic self craves: forgiveness of all his sins. Mercy. Christ is holding out to him the very thing for which his soul (the existence of which he denies) is starving.

If we are honest, if we admit that we are guilt-wracked, and we find that we are offered not the punishment we expect but mercy, then our only possible response is contrition. The prodigal son went home for all the wrong reasons, and went through the apologies he knew he must make for all the wrong reasons, but his father's loving mercy overwhelmed him. His brother was shocked and angry, as we might expect. (And I know how he felt!)  But the Father shows divine mercy. No punishment, just an embrace. And in God's loving, merciful embrace, the response of our heart can only be... contrite love.

We love God because he loved us first, St Paul tells us. If we are fortunate, someone looks at us with real, unconditional love in their eyes, and our hearts turn somersaults. We love them back. It's just how love works.

With love, comes forgiveness. Within marriage, the mutual mercifulness of husband and wife. With religious profession, the tolerant embrace of brothers and sisters. These are echoes of the lovingkindness of the heart of our God who, in love, offers even those who do not believe that He exists, the forgiveness of all their sins.

We can only pray for those who do not know Him that some day, this side of the veil or the other, they comprehend the beauty of God's mercy and lovingkindness, and fall into His arms with the relief of being-made-whole which, beneath the furore of their fierce rejection of Him, their souls quietly crave.