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.
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
Let nobody speak mischief of anybody.
Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence.
There are two ways to wash the dishes. One way is to wash them to get them clean. The other way is to wash them in order to wash the dishes.
There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time.
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