Oh hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines with Aquinas.

In this episode, I would like to talk about mercy.

So you'll often hear mercy used in Christian conversations.

So it's a virtue that we want to cultivate. It's also a devotion that we want to practice.

You know, the divine mercy made popular by St. Faustina Kovalska.

But then sometimes you'll hear it used or like lumped together with a kind of vague sentiment or with the removal of negative emotional experience.

Or with, you know, the kind of magical resolution of very difficult pastoral problems.

And I don't think those are true and as a result of which, I don't think they're helpful.

So we're going to go ahead and distinguish what, you know, real mercy is in fact.

So that way we can cultivate the genuine virtue and welcome the divine gift. So here we go.

All right, so let's talk about a more basic expression than a more exalted expression and then a divine expression and then how that kind of registers in our life.

So the most basic expression would be the kind of emotional expression of mercy.

So the word mercy, you know, we take it from the Latin misericordia, which just means to be made miserable of heart.

So there's the sense that when you're exhibiting mercy, you're struck with pity for another person.

Like the other person finds him or herself in a difficult situation, right, some kind of loss or devastation or illness or whatever.

Okay, and you witness that, you see that and it cuts you to the quick, right?

So it makes you experience something of their trial, temptation, sorrow, whatever else.

All right, so that just be like the emotional experience as it were and we would call that pity typically.

Now, when we get to the higher registers and here we're talking about something that we might call like affection or something that we can just call simply a virtue.

So this would be a more like stable and permanent disposition of the human heart that allows us to act easily, promptly, joyfully, under the influence of reason for what is genuinely good.

And in the case of mercy, we're talking about a virtue which is associated with charity.

So it's a virtue which flows from love.

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