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, accomplished, fulfilled reality on the one hand; potentiality and becoming—unfulfilled beings—on the other.

Only God, who is absolute Being, is pure act—full and infinite Reality, to which no shadow of mutability attaches.

In eternity only shall we, too, be accomplished: not pure act, to be sure, for even there our being will be dependent on God; but sharers in the immutability of God insofar as we shall no longer contain any element of mere potentiality but have our whole being realized in one eternal moment. There (and there alone) we shall be past all becoming, having attained to a being free from all changeableness. All values in us will have matured to full actuality, with no room left for any potential ones. All that we are will be set out in its definitive shape.