Mercy, Not Liberalism

Some liberals speak of God’s mercy as if it were his acceptance of disorder. With regard to some sin, they may say, “I don’t think God cares about a little thing like that.” Or, “I’m sure God understands.” They speak of his mercy as if it were a kind of divine apathy.

They would have us think of God as a mother who gives up on her children, or, if they would permit us to think of him as father at all, like a father who despairs of his wife, but who refrains, at least, from crushing her.

But God’s mercy is precisely not that he leaves us in disorder. Rather, the mercy of God creates ways of restoring us to grace. When we forsake the divine authority of God, for example, by disobeying the natural law, justice would have us cut off from God; the wages of sin is death. But God’s mercy moves him to seek us out and to reorder our lives even then.

Those of us who take a more conservative approach to life can also fall into thinking of God’s mercy as a mere permissiveness that enables him to stop caring about disorder for a moment. But God never stops caring, because God is love, and love is caritas, that is, caring.

We are the ones who compromise the integrity of our lives by disobeying both the divine and natural law, disordering the pieces of our Jenga tower, while saying of God’s mercy, “I’m sure he won’t mind if it falls.” But why would God ever allow our lives to fall apart? And what kind of God would be content to see us moving the pieces of our lives into precarious positions without trying to help us? Could we really worship such a God? Could we ever love him?

All of the Saints whom we celebrate today, unique as they are in character, have one thing in common: they all permited God to reorder their lives according to his will. Either in life or in the hour of death, they allowed God to reorder their lives.

If there is nothing out of place in heaven, nor any rooms where the disordered abide, it will not be, as the liberal thinks, because God’s mercy has enabled him to overlook some disorder. It will be rather, because his mercy, his greatest attribute, has found a way to save those of us most in need of his mercy, we who would otherwise have been lost in our disorder. +