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Nor is this holy sovereignty possible without humility. He alone who is deeply humble is blessed with true inward freedom and fluidity; he alone is free from all impeding hardness. The general significance of humility as a condition of all participation in the divine life stands out in particular brightness when it is a question of mercy. Our possession of the highest human virtue (which is humility) constitutes the necessary foundation for our progress towards sharing the specifically divine virtue of mercy. We must die to ourselves so that the mercy of Christ may fill us. With St. John the Baptist we must say: “He must increase; but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

Our mercy toward others is the measure of our life in Christ

Mercy, the specifically supernatural virtue, thus provides a touchstone more infallible perhaps than the test of any other virtue for a life conceived and molded in Christ. Hence, the question whether we have been merciful must play a decisive part in our examination of conscience. Many are the occasions for mercy which we miss. Only too often do we, as did the Pharisee, pass by a wounded one—clinging to our personal concerns, circumscribed by our lack of freedom.

Yet, the virtue by which we live hourly is precisely the one of which we ought to be most mindful. And the mercy of God is what we live by. It pervades our lives integrally; it is the primal truth on which the whole being of a Christian rests. “For his mercy endureth forever” (Ps. 135:1). Indeed, the light of which the Psalmist says, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us” (Ps. 4:7), is His mercy who “maketh His sun to rise upon the good and bad” (Matt. 5:45) and who “spared not even His own Son” (Rom. 8:32) in order to redeem us.

The way to attain the virtue of mercy lies in our constant awareness of being encompassed by mercy; of the fact that mercy is the air we children of God are breathing. May the mercy of God, of whom the Church says: “With eternal love did the Lord love us, wherefore He drew us, raised from the earth, to His heart in commiseration” (Office of the Sacred Heart of Jesus)—may this mercy of God pierce and transform our hearts. May it draw us into the orbit of its all-conquering, liberating, suave power, before which all worldly standards collapse.

For according to the words of the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”), only insofar as we become merciful ourselves may we harvest the fruits of His mercy and taste, on a day to come, the last word of His mercy “that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard: neither hath it entered into the heart of man” (1 Cor. 2:9).

“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”

16

Holy Sorrow

AS HAS been pointed out on several occasions, supernatural life represents something radically new, apart from other new aspects it introduces, in that its fullness reveals certain vestiges of that coincidentia oppositorum—that union of apparently irreconcilable opposites—which is a privilege of divine life. Qualities which cannot subsist in a person simultaneously so long as he has not relinquished the standpoint of nature—such as patience combined with fervent zeal, or again, peacefulness and an eager readiness to fight for a good cause—appear to achieve an organic mutual penetration in the character of the saints.

The greater our participation in divine life, the more enhanced is the possibility for us to actualize, in one single attitude, a diversity of virtues which in the natural perspective cannot but exclude one another.

Earthly man suffers the tension of becoming

This notwithstanding, a certain essential duality, an irremovable division as it were, remains inherent in our terrestrial situation as such. Of this duality the Christian consciousness must inevitably take account.

Again, that duality or breach manifests itself under two aspects. First, man in his earthly existence is a mixed act, as scholastic philosophy puts it; he is partly in act, partly in potency. In other words, we constitute actual,