MERCY BY CONTACT

Mercy by contact

T HIS YEAR of Mercy is already seeing some powerful articulations and celebrations of divine compassion throughout the Christian world. A million lives will be transformed. A million hopes renewed. A million holy doors opened in human hearts. For this blessed springtime of the soul to continue, Pope Francis emphasises that our celebrations of mercy must reach beyond any routine actions and prayers; they must be fleshed and heartfelt. In Misericordiae Vultus, his bull of indiction of this Jubilee Year, the Pope has urged that this year’s season of Lent “should be lived more intensely as a privileged moment to celebrate and experience God’s mercy”. For him it is the actual experience of mercy in the giving and the receiving that matters most. In his Mercy: the essence of the Gospel and the key to Christian life, Cardinal Walter Kasper wrote that mercy is “the best thing we can feel: it changes the world”.

TO ACCOMPLISH this mission of making mercy and love tangible around us, we need to actually become this merciful love, so that we are in ourselves a sacrament of God’s mercy for others. There is a divinity that lies at the heart of us all, of every single thing we do, think and say. Our faith teaches that divine mercy and love are incarnate in our every effort to “heal the wound”, as Francis puts it, in ourselves and others.

 It also reminds us that God needs our cooperation to reach a radically distorted humanity. St Teresa knew that the Risen Christ could not fulfil his dream for the earth without the corporal cooperation of our lives and senses. Inspired by the Holy Spirit, we sinners are the face of God’s mercy.

This is an astonishing dimension of incarnation – that we ourselves, in all our contradictions and imperfections, are the living sacraments of God’s incarnate mercy, a mercy that cannot be shown or received except through us. The Christian faith does not waver in its enduring certainty of that revealed reality. In our precarious presence, we are empowered by the incarnate Spirit.

 Beyond the necessary preaching, teaching and converting, beyond our individual acts of kindness and goodness, there is the deeper, forgotten, redeeming power of human presence itself. This presence is the source of what Blessed John Henry Newman calls the “catching influence” that transforms the lives of others.

As we move further into 2016, we need to reflect with excitement and anticipation on our identity as “other Christs”, as the fleshed presence of mercy. To achieve this, we need a deeper understanding of our faith. In baptism we are all called to be the priests and priestesses of incarnation, consecrating the world by the holy work of love and mercy, reminding people that even in the darkest days of death by terrorist atrocities, bombing missions and human self-destruction, the divine compassion is still somehow alive, even in loveless and demonic places.

 We ourselves, by faithfulness to our baptism, and by living eucharistically, are transubstantiating the poisoned bread of rampant evil into a healing food for famished hearts. Do we believe this about ourselves? The Pope reminds us that the Year of Mercy is about a radical transformation in “who we believe we are”.

 Our senses, it is revealed, are sacred. They are the real communicators of mercy, providing the actual experience of saving presence in the here and now. Pope Francis has written about the way people catch compassion from someone’s sensitive presence. In Evangelii Gaudium, he emphasises our personal role in salvation when “touching human pain, touching the suffering flesh of others, entering into the reality of other people’s lives through the power of tenderness” (270).

By the expression on his face when he reaches for someone who is clearly in trouble, by the warmth of his eyes and in his wholehearted embrace, the Pope himself is a fleshly icon of the mercy he has become. “I’m not contagious,” said Vinicio Riva, the man with neurofibromatosis whom the Pope hugged, “but he did not know that. He just did it – he caressed me all over my face, and as he did it I felt only love.” There is a maternal devotion in God’s ways with us.

 By the experience of divine presence within ourselves, we release the divine presence in those we serve. By personally experiencing the felt reality of God’s mercy and love, we make real the healing power in others too. By a compassionate sensitivity and our inner wholeness, we bring to birth in others the seeds of hope at the moment of their desperate powerlessness in the face of defiled innocence and a deadly depravity.

 THE HOLY WORK of mercy, whether to heal the tragedies on distant shores or in a neighbour’s broken heart, is about drawing out, as a teacher does her pupils, as a mother does her child, as the sun does the seed, the original beauty, the hidden self-belief, the divine courage in all who suffer.

When the shutters of a nation are closed to despairing refugees, or the door of a house down the street is shut to an erring family member, nothing will get in there to change anything except raw human hearts full of incarnate love.

Many may think the Year of Mercy attempts to do the impossible in a deeply damaged humanity. Maybe so. But just because something’s impossible with men does not mean we should not try to do it. We are well aware we will die with our ambitious goals of love unfinished, our projects unachieved. But, trusting in divine mercy, we continue to do the best we can.

One thing is sure: we cannot be that merciful presence unless we are already soaked in mercy. We ourselves must be on the path of a liberating transformation before others can catch hope from us. It is about who we really are, beneath our achievements or special qualifications. Being merciful is about being truly present to the daily human struggle to reach beyond the dark. And that reaching for and glimpsing of the light is called resurrection made flesh. The Year of Mercy is also the Year of personal and universal Resurrection.