"Pull Yourself Up" Won't Work Here!

A Time for Mercy

When Pope Francis called for a Holy Year of Mercy, I found his timing providential in view of rampant violence, suffering families, and individuals afflicted with addictions and the burden of emotional pain.

Pope Francis challenged us to not only receive and rejoice in God’s mercy but to show that same mercy to others. It’s high time, he seemed to be saying, that we Christians practice the mercy that God has given us. We have the opportunity to do this in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and in our dealings with one another every day.

Copyright 2016 by R. L. Drake

In order to understand mercy, we have to recognize, first, I suppose, our need for mercy on a personal level. So we have to use some culturally unpopular “s” words. We are all sinners. We all need a savior. To put it bluntly: without a savior, we are sunk. We are like a drowning man, with no hope for salvation but for the man on the boat with the life preserver. We recognize that the man on the boat is Jesus Christ.

Disintegration

What is sin? I think it was St. Pio who said, in simplest terms, that sin is infidelity to love. 

God is love, and so, when we act against God, we act against love. Sin, in essence, is the betrayal of a relationship, the most important one we could ever have, that with God. “Against you, you alone have I sinned; I have done what is evil in your eyes” (Ps 51:6, NABRE). As Pope Francis has reminded us, we all fall at some point in our lives.

Copyright 2016 by R.L. Drake

Sin is a kind of disintegration. We start to fall apart under the weight of our sin. To be integrated is to be whole, complete. Sin shatters us. It breaks us into pieces, into fragments of ourselves. Love, on the other hand, brings integration, wholeness, unity. After all, what else is a saint but a fully integrated human being? A saint lives in unity with God, unified in himself.

We all crave unity within ourselves and unity with God. In Catholic terms, we call this unity communion. We yearn for the perfect happiness of heaven. We were made for communion with God and with one another. Really, we were made for love, which only happens in the context of relationship. When we sin, we undermine our relationship with God and each other because we act against the demands of love. Saint Pope John Paul II said that the only proper response to a person is love.

When I sin, I not only betray love but I diminish my capacity for love. I compromise my integrity by denying my own meaning and purpose, which is to love. If love is selfless self-giving, then sin is a selfish self-seeking at the expense of others. Through sin, I deny my identity as a child of God.

Sin that is deadly, which we call “mortal,” takes me all the way to the “distant country” that the prodigal son ventured into (cf. Lk 15:11-32). Deadly sin is a squandering of my inheritance as a child of God (cf. Lk 15:13). When I commit deadly sin I, in effect, orphan myself.

Sin that is not deadly, what we call “venial sin,” weakens my bond with God as Father, but it doesn’t sever it. Venial sin may be a wandering off the porch of my Father’s house, but it isn’t a decisive cleaving of my relationship with the Father and His family (the Church) by going all the way to the distant country.

Still, venial sin can begin to blind me to reality and the demands of love, and mortal sin becomes more likely “[E]vils surround me until they cannot be counted. My sins overtake me, so that I can no longer see. They are more numerous than the hairs of my head; my courage fails me” (Psalm 40:13, NABRE). Before I know it, I can cross the property line, make the trek into the distant country, and find myself far from the Father's house. For those of us who have made the trek at some point, or points, in our lives, we know the desolation of being in that land of famine.

Bootstraps Won't Work Here

We need a savior to restore the relationship. In the economy of salvation, there is no room for the All-American, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality. In fact, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re the ones who made the mess we need salvation from. Do we honestly think we can make our way out of our messes, using the same mind and will that created them in the first place? Left to our own devices, we usually make things far worse.

The Good News is, God’s love is so much greater than our sins. “He has not dealt with us as our sins merit, nor requited us as our wrongs deserve” (Ps 103:10, NABRE). In Jesus, we experience redemption. “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us” (Ps 103:12, NABRE).

God hears our cries for mercy and heeds them with tender compassion and love. We cry, with the psalmist, “Look upon my affliction and suffering; take away all my sins” (Ps 25:18, NABRE). And God responds with the Word who was made flesh, Jesus. We encounter the merciful Lord in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Penance. In Jesus Christ, God reaches down to extend his hand of friendship in the midst of the messes of our lives. To borrow a line from Robert Browning, "Such ever was love's way: to rise, it stoops” (A Death in the Desert). 

Such is God's merciful way.

In the next post, we'll look at the power of forgiveness, one of the most powerful defenses against the Enemy who seeks to destroy our relationship with God and one another.