Mercy, mercy, mercy! There is today’s Gospel in a nutshell. Allow those words to be the ultimate guide for your life and all will be well. I’m not fooling. That’s it…mercy, mercy, mercy. I’m not talking about God’s mercy. I’m talking about you and I being merciful to one another.
We sometimes think that religion is about believing the right things, and that if we believe the right things we are safe. But that’s not the way it is. Rather our faith seems to be about awareness, about having our eyes opened to the real world, and responding with mercy and compassion to it.
If we follow a very basic guideline, we won't have any need to live in fear that our neglect will outweigh the good we have done. Whenever we find ourselves face to face with a person in need, we must respond to that person as best we can. At times, we will not be able to fill the empty hearts or empty stomachs of everyone we meet. But we can be at peace if we know that we have reached deep within ourselves, and offered the best we have to those in need.
We all have different capacities to love and to give. Each of us needs to be aware of our limitations, but we also need to be aware of our possibilities. At times, we sell ourselves short, thinking that we can't do very much in this world to help make things better. That's a thought we need to get rid of at the first opportunity. Every single person has something irreplaceable to give to another person. We all have something we can offer to some other person that will make a difference in that person’s life.
As Saint Teresa of Calcutta has written: We need to discover “Christ in his distressing disguise."