To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair.
Interpretation
Desiring God's mercy recognizes His divine nature and reflects on justice intertwined with mercy.
In this quote, Thomas Merton emphasizes the relationship between divine mercy and justice. He suggests that to ask God for mercy is to acknowledge His role as a higher power, and that true justice is intertwined with mercy, as it does not exclude those who come to Him in humility and faith, despite their shortcomings. Merton posits that mercy is a divine quality that encompasses justice while offering compassion to those who do not turn away in despair.
In practice
In a sermon about the nature of God during a church service.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
No intelligent man will ever be so bold as to put into language those things which his reason has contemplated.
He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, without any effort for distinction.
I will come out with my interpretation. If I'm wrong, fine. It will become part of the debris of history, part of the give and take.
We are not responsible to God for the soul that are saved, but we are responsible for the Gospel that is preached, and for the way in which we preach it
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.
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