Let's start the week with Thomas Merton again turning to Thomas Aquinas.
St Thomas continues this remarkable analysis by considering those who are "obsessed" with the notion of insult, either because they have suffered a humiliation or because they intend to humilate another.
"They are provoked to anger and aggression, which are virile passions. These make a person think that s/he is in danger of suffering some future evil (which s/he intends to resist). When people are so disposed, they do not have mercy on others. Likewise the proud do not have mcery because they despise others and look upon them as evil, taking it for granted that these people deserve to suffer whatever they have to suffer.
We are a fragile people. How quickly anger and aggression can slide its way into our lives. Too often, in the midst of hurt and pain and embarrassment and shame and insult, we turn to to the "other" and place the blame of all things on "them." We slip into believing what we are in danger and must, in some way, "dispose" of them. How quickly we can lose the ability to have mercy. We cannot have mercy or even think about mercy because we have built up a world of potential threat and the only way to resist that threat is by our own anger and aggression directed toward those who we have somehow created as our enemy and as ones "after" us. More and more when I hear candidates speak of the "radical Islamic terrorists" being the greatest threat in the world, my breath is literally taken away from me for a moment. How in the world will there be change the world when we are so easily "set up" for war and not for mercy?!?
Connection: It would do us well to take the chance at catching ourselves in the act of being mercy-less. It often happens too quickly for us to even see it pass through us.
Merciful Lord, when it is not like us to act within the Reign of your mercy, pull us in...pull us in. Amen.
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