Temples of an Unimaginable Mercy

Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice / Of compassion, pity, understanding? / To be human is to be completely alien among the galaxies. / Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Religion Comes,” in Second Space (2004), 58

The world is not impersonal. Oh, it seems like it at times: cold, uncaring, callous. But that is not the world I accept as my ultimate home, either in the future or here and now. It is not the world that determines the decisions I make each day. I hear mercy and compassion in the human song. It gives me hope. It grants me a glimpse of God.

None of us is immune to the evil around us. But neither must we accept that Hobbes was right—that life without some tenuous social contract is nasty, cruel, brutish, and short. Selfish desires are our bane, but what makes us as human beings “alien among the galaxies” is that we have the capacity for compassion. Altruism isn’t just a cover for some deeper self-interest. We really do have the capacity for love.

Remember when you first fell in love. Didn’t something tingle inside? It was a connecting point in you that was tied by an emotional cord to a connecting point in someone else. It was your identity moving from within your skin into the larger sphere of relationship. It was your soul accepting a universe whose underlying cause is love.

When Jesus alludes to his body as a temple, he’s speaking about being torn down and raised up. But I believe there’s also something of the unimaginable sacredness of human community behind his words. It is as community that we are his body, his temple that can never be torn down completely, because we are always being raised up by the compassion, mercy, and love of God.

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.