Works of Mercy: Praying For The Living and The Dead

And so we come to the end of this series on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. I have been trying in this series to put our focus, truly, on what the Year of Mercy is all about—it is not about all the pastoral questions that have dominated Catholic social media this week around marriage and divorce and who can or cannot receive communion.

It is not that this is unimportant stuff—of course it is. And I fully intend to weigh in with my own thoughts on the matter… assuming I ever get around to reading the exhortation. I have simply been too busy this week to be able to get to it.

But as interesting and important as all this stuff is… it is not the focus of this Year. Shouldn’t be, anyhow. The focus of the Year of Mercy is meant to be how you and I can make God’s mercy more visible, more tangible, more known in the world. And that is done, not by endlessly chewing over controversies that may or may not have too much to do with us directly in the final analysis, but by being merciful ourselves to everyone.

And so we come to the last spiritual work of mercy, to pray for the living and the dead. This is without question the most mysterious of all the works. To put a bowl of stew in front of a hungry man is obvious. To offer consolation to a suffering soul is not easy, but also not too mysterious. And so it is with all the other works of mercy—they may be difficult or easy, according to our natural gifts and talents and supernatural charisms. But they are not terribly mysterious, really. Teach someone something. Visit someone sick. Help someone out one way or another.

And… say a prayer for them while you’re at it. And here we pass into the realm of mystery. Because of course prayer is simply lifting them up into the care of God and His Mercy. Prayer is asking God to show mercy to His people, and leaving them at the feet of Christ.

It is a profound mystery of faith, intercessory prayer. If there is any action we perform that is more a blind act of faith, I don’t know what it is. God is hidden from us—we do not see Him, hear Him. Not normally, not in the ordinary course of events. And our prayers fly from our lips and our hearts… into this hidden mystery. Into the abyss that is the human ‘experience’ of God in this life.

There is nothing else we do that is more strictly a matter of faith. We do not see our prayers reach the throne of God. We do not see God bend His ear to our prayers. We certainly do not see Him answering our prayers, not in any way that would satisfy any normal demand of evidence. It is all a black, dark mystery locked in the mystery of God’s hidden ways with us.

And yet… we pray. Well, we should pray, anyhow. Prayer, besides being an act of faith, is also an act of humility. It is acknowledging that I really cannot help anyone in the final analysis. Not really, not as they need to be helped. I can do this and that, be it cook them a meal or teach them a course, listen to them and (I hope!) give good counsel.

But that is not what people need. Not really, not entirely. What we need is… well, what do you think? Personally, I don’t really know. But He does. So at the end of the day (and hopefully the beginning and the middle of it, too) we lift them up to God. Lord have mercy. God bless him, God help her. Your will be done in their lives. Your love be triumphant in that one, in this one. Have mercy, Lord, have mercy.

This is the work of mercy, both mysterious beyond the others, but also I believe effective and powerful beyond the others as well. In the end, it is God’s mercy we all need, not my mercy or yours. His mercy (we, well, pray) flows through mine and yours, but it is His that ultimately is the healing of humanity.

So… as we pass through the rest of the days and weeks of this Year of Mercy, let us strive to refer everything finally to the mercy of God, and above all let us pray for one another, for all suffering people, for our enemies should we happen to have any, and for all men and women, living and dead. May God’s mercy win the victory in every human life and bring us all to the eternal feast of mercy awaiting us on the other side of the veil.

Works of Mercy: Comforting the Afflicted

Wednesday has rolled around again, and with Wednesday another installment in the ‘works of mercy’. As the Year of Mercy wends its way onwards, it can be difficult to keep it in view—our attention always wants to wander somewhere else, right? But mercy, of course, is not just a subject to ponder for a year and then move on to something else (Coming up next, the Jubilee Year of Prudence!). It is the work of a lifetime to practice the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

And so today we come to the work of comforting the afflicted. What’s this one about? In a sense aren’t all the works of mercy some form of this? Someone is afflicted with hunger or thirst, imprisonment or ignorance or doubt… and is it not a great consolation when someone assuages your need by giving you what you lack?

It certainly is that. But this work of comforting the afflicted in particular pertains to what we can offer people when we cannot, perhaps, offer them any direct assistance for their suffering. Someone who is grieving a death, say. Or suffering from any of the myriad blows that life can deal out—failure, rejection, losses of all kinds.

It is a wonderful thing to put a bowl of hot soup in front of a hungry person and know you are directly filling their need. But sometimes soup alone just doesn’t do it. And what the person really needs is friendship, presence, a compassionate ear, a word of faith or hope.

Comforting the afflicted is about meeting people on that level of personal presence and relationship. It is not directly about fixing the problem—it is about being with the person in the problem so that they know they are not alone in it, which is the greatest comfort possible.

It is a great thing to solve someone’s problem for them, and if it can be done, by all means do it. But so many situations in life either have to work themselves out over time, or require patient waiting on the person to be ready to do what is needed. Or, often, the person really does know what to do and may even by doing all they can, but it doesn’t take the affliction away, not immediately.

Comforting the afflicted is the work that is done ‘in the meantime’. The work done while waiting for the healing to happen, while waiting for the suffering to abate. It is one of the hardest works, because there is so often so little you are able to do for the person, and being present with them and in their life means that you suffer, at least a little, what they are suffering. And this is hard for us poor human beings, who are weak and oftentimes selfish.

What is the comfort we offer people, though. I hope that the people in my life who I try to be present to as they go through hard things know that at least Fr. Denis Lemieux cares about them. I suppose that is some comfort (well, better than nothing, I guess!). But my conviction is that what really consoles us is knowing, through the concrete love and support we receive from other people, that we are not abandoned by God in this affliction.

My own experience of being comforted in my affliction has shown me that the comforter, the one offering friendship and presence in suffering, is a sort of sacrament of God’s merciful steadfast love in the life of the afflicted one. Ultimately it is God who heals our sorrow and removes our affliction; ultimately, even if this problem or that misfortune is removed, it is God who heals the wound of our humanity, the terrible wound that all of us carry within us. And we bring tremendous comfort to one another by simply being that presence of love in one another’s lives, so that Love Himself may come to dwell with us more tangibly.

In short, we need to be willing to be present on Golgotha for one another, to stand at the foot of one another’s crosses, unable to do anything except be there, if we are to journey with the other to the empty tomb, the upper room, the road to Emmaus, the shores of the sea of Galilee, and meet together the one who is Consolation and Joy for all humanity. And that is the great work of mercy that runs through all the works of mercy for all of us.

Works of Mercy: Forgiving Offences Willingly

So, as I was just saying eight weeks ago… yeah, it seems a little weird to just pick up the series I was doing before Lent began, way back in early February.  In case your memory is a little shaky, Wednesdays on the blog I had been going through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, all part of helping us understand what we’re supposed to be doing in this Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy.

As I thought would happen, it seems to me that we don’t hear too much about the Year of Mercy lately. We human beings have such short attention spans—for many people it seems to have been a ‘two months of Mercy’, and then let’s move on to something else. Like, I don’t know, Donald Trump or something.

But the Year goes until Christ the King, so let’s try to keep mercy at the forefront And here we are in the very heart of the year, with Mercy Sunday just around the corner. And this whole Octave of Easter is all about celebrating the victory of mercy, the victory of God’s love in the world, lavishing life in the place of death, shining light into the innermost recesses of darkness and gloom, and above all pouring out God’s forgiveness of sin upon all humanity. Mercy has been given us, and it has been given us by the Risen Lord Jesus.

And so we come to the spiritual work of mercy that is most divine in nature of all of them: to forgive offences willingly. It is more than appropriate to contemplate this work of mercy in the very Week of Mercy, the week when we all are basking in the joyful fact that God has forgiven our sins through the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

It is a formula so simple and logical that a small child can understand it: what has been done for us, we must do for one another. God sees us in all our un-glory, all our warts and open wounds, all our roughness and sharp edges, all our deliberate choices to not love, to not obey, to not do what is good and right. He sees all that, and His response is to extend mercy to all humanity. We have to accept that gift, and the acceptance of that gift is our repentance, our contrition, our prayer for forgiveness. 

But let us be very clear—the offer is made, the gift is extended, mercy is real and is there for every human being no matter how wretched and corrupt their life has become.

What God is for us, we are to be for one another. It is that simple. So we must forgive one another—we must, absolutely. Forgive one another in the small things of life—the little annoyances, the hurtful comments or thoughtless acts. And forgive in the big things of life, too—the deep wounds others have inflicted on us either culpably through malice or selfishness, or through some incapacity, blindness, or negligence.

The small things are easier to forgive, but not always that easy. It is easier to store up resentments, to keep a close account of just how crummy this person is treating me, just in case I decide to strike back at them at some point. You know, present them with how big an account they’ve run up, and demand payback.

Forgiveness in the small things is a work we have to continually choose. Letting one another off the hook, as God lets us off the hook. With the big things, it is again a work, but it is a much deeper and more difficult work, one that extends over time and is part of a whole journey of healing and integration.

One cannot simply paper over a deep wound of life—abuse, say, or some terrible act of violence or malicious harm—with a facile “Well, I forgive that person.” You cannot put a Band-Aid over a severed artery, and you cannot blithely ‘forgive’ those major hurts of life.

But forgiveness must happen, in time, a necessary and vital part of the healing process. And I think that even as other things are happening—as one gets the help one needs to be healed of such wounds—that we can start nonetheless by praying for the one who hurt us, by choosing forgiveness insofar as we choose to return a blessing for a curse, good for evil.

There is much to say about this—more than I can say in a blog post. But in this fundamental choice we truly are acting as sons and daughters of our Father in heaven, truly embracing the immensity and beauty of our royal dignity and stature. And in that, declaring that our life is much bigger, that we are much bigger, than the wounds and hurts inflicted on us, the harm done to us by the other person.

And ultimately in this, both the small everyday acts of forgiveness and the commitment to the big acts of forgiveness, we are choosing to have our life be about making manifest the love and mercy of God in the world. And this is Christianity, this is what it is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. So let’s do the best we can today, and show forth his mercy by being very merciful to everyone we meet.

Works of Mercy: Bearing Wrongs Patiently

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. My trip out west to give a retreat to some of our MH people in Regina went well, but as always, it’s good to be home.

Our Wednesday trip through the works of mercy has taken us to an interesting one of the spiritual works, namely, to bear wrongs patiently. What’s that about? What does that have to do with mercy? And is that really a good thing? Why should we put up with other people’s failings and bad behavior anyhow? Isn’t that just being a doormat, a patsy, a victim?

It is worth noting, first, that the next work of mercy will be ‘to forgive offenses willingly’. The Church is making a distinction here between things actually done to us as deliberate wrongs (offenses) and simply things that are out of order, not what they should be (wrongs).

This is a distinction that we don’t always quite succeed in making—that between things that simply annoy us, irk us, bug us, and then those things that actually are injuries done to us on purpose. And we can work up quite a little martyr complex for ourselves, based on the fact that people just are not conforming to our (perfectly reasonable, OF COURSE) expectations and standards.

Well, phooey. Of course people don’t live up to your expectations and standards. That’s because they don’t have to. That’s because you’re not God. Take a pill. Settle down. Unclench. This business of bearing wrongs patiently is a fundamental matter of human maturity and a necessary part of living a peaceful life in this world with your fellow man.

People are… well, what they are. Some people talk too much. Others are untidy. Some people have less than ideal hygiene. Others are moody and withdrawn. Some people are indecisive and anxious. Others take charge of every situation, whether that is exactly called for or not. Some people are immature and emotionally volatile; others are grumpy and dour (especially first thing in the morning – yikes!). And… some people are hyper-critical and take careful notice of exactly what everyone else is doing wrong, eh?

In other words, when you’re trying (or not) to bear other people’s wrongs patiently, be aware that they are also having to bear your wrongs patiently, too. A little perspective and perhaps even a sense of humor goes a long way here. We all get on each other’s nerves—this is one of the things you find out, living in religious community as I do. Everyone gets on everyone’s nerves… at least sometimes. ‘There are no compatible people,’ one of our wise elders once said.

The thing with bearing wrongs patiently is that it saves us a lot of time and energy, that we can then devote to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, instructing the ignorant, comforting the afflicted, and so forth. In other words, in itself it is a work of mercy, but it is a work of mercy that chiefly is a matter of not doing something, namely trying to fix everyone and especially to make him stop doing that thing that is SO ANNOYING!!! And in that refraining from action, we free up our cluttered calendar so we can actually do things that do some good in this world.

Now, I’m writing lightly about this matter, because as I say, a little bit of good humor really does go a long way in terms of how to actually be patient with the foibles and shortcomings of those we live. I do know that sometimes the wrongs can be quite difficult to bear and that it can be actually heroic in some cases to live in certain situations. Making light of it is often a good strategy, but of course sometimes we have to go a bit deeper than that.

On the other hand, there can be a tendency to make mountains out of molehills here, to just harp about every little thing that is wrong. And the thing of it is, when we fall into that, then the legitimate works of instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner are spoiled—the signal-to-noise ratio gets out of whack. Someone who is constantly complaining and never satisfied with anyone’s efforts is not going to have much luck addressing things that are actual problems that do need addressing. Choose your battles, in other words.

On a deeper level, we have to realize that it is the actual people God has put us with, and specifically those aspects of these people that we might find hard to bear, that are the purifying and sanctifying agents in all of our lives. ‘We are the hairshirts of God for one another’, Catherine Doherty famously observed. The question, she went on to say, is ‘do you love your hairshirt?’

It does help the more we can realize that all the ‘wrongs’ we poor martyred people have to put up with (snort) are in fact there to help us become the saints of God we are meant to be. So we can stop complaining a bit about them, simply accept that we are, in fact, not God, and that other people are not put on this earth to be pleasing to us. And… get on with the real work of the day, which is to love and serve, serve and love, and attend to what God is asking of you and of me, not of them. So, let’s try to do that, today.