mercy

image from A Circle of Friends

“Our personal lives and the lives of so many people are deeply affected by the staggering lack of forgiveness in our world. People are held captive by revenge and bitterness, by hostility and alienation…
 Lack of forgiveness—the showing of mercy to others—sabotages our ability to love. And without unfettered love in our lives, we distance ourselves from God and from others, often ending in a deep estrangement from the loving person we are called to be by God.”

~Edward O’Donnell, OCD,

 in Spiritual Life, Fall 2012

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great/And would suffice.

~Fire and Ice,

by Robert Frost

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praying at Mass

Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala

“We know now in what way Christ would live in our humanity. Not as One who, having proved his love, has gone back to his Father leaving us a sealed tomb, but as One who, having tasted to the full the joys and sorrows of human nature, having embraced the grief of mankind, having drained death to the last bitter dregs, sets his wounded feet in the dust again, takes bread into his wounded hands again, and seizing a doubting friend’s hand, thrusts I into his sounded heart; as though saying by his every act to all who would ever tremble and doubt: “I did not wipe the tears from the face of sorrow to lay sorrow by. I did not touch pain with fierce redeeming beauty to have done with it; I cannot give myself into the arms of death to cast death aside! I made all these things my own that the glory I gave to them should be yours, that while they remain with you, I shall remain with them.” He has taken all those things to himself, and has changed them all for us.”

~Caryll Houselander, as quoted in Magnificat, April 7, 2013