Mercy is the cement which somehow kneaded our civilization in past centuries.

It is mercy that matures and maintains our relationships through time. It transforms falling in love into real love, sympathy, and empathy into big and strong projects. It changes our “forever” pronounced in youth into a reality. It prevents maturity and old age from becoming just a nostalgic story of broken dreams.

Mercy lives in three simultaneous movements: the eyes, the gut, and the heart.

Mercy: a look from the eyes 
Those who are merciful are first and foremost people who are able to see deeper. The first instant of mercy is a look that reconstructs the moral and spiritual figure of the one that arouses mercy in us. Before moving to “take care of him,” the merciful one looks at him and sees him in a different way.

The “not yet” is glimpsed beyond the “already” and that which “has already been.” Prior to being an ethical action, mercy is a movement of the soul, with which I can see the other in their original design, before the error and the fall, and I love them in order to recreate their true nature. Mercy can reconstruct the broken image in the soul. It can reconstruct one’s disrupted storyline.

It can see that there is an inter-human solidarity that is deeper and truer than any crime. It believes that fraternity is not canceled by any fratricide. It sees Adam again, even after Cain.

Mercy from the guts 
While it perceives purity in impurity, beauty in ugliness, light within the darkness, it also moves the body, and touches one in the flesh. Guts are moved. Mercy involves the whole body, it is a total experience, something like the birth of a new creature. If there was no mercy, the experience of childbirth would remain totally inaccessible even to males; and yet we can understand something of this mystery, the greatest of all, when we give life with mercy.

Mercy is something that is felt, it hurts, there is labor involved in it. It is an embodied or corporal experience. For this reason, those who know mercy also know disdain. If I do not suffer viscerally from all the injustice and evil around me, I cannot be merciful. The same gut makes us indignant and angry in front of children who have died locked up inside a lorry or drowned at sea. It also makes us forgive a friend who betrayed us.

Mercy from the heart 
Mercy is a blend of gift and virtue. The ability to see the remaining immaculate part in the “heart” of the other even after the most heinous crime (it is actually a living part, and it remains alive until the last second of our lives because if it wasn’t so, we would only be demons). It is not the fruit of our efforts. It is all gratuitousness.

It is a gift received from life, from our family and education in childhood and youth. Mercy, however, also needs commitment and virtue. When we have seen through our soul and listened to our guts, we freely decide that it’s time for action, for the movement of our legs, hands, and mind. Virtue and commitment, which come always after the gift of the “heart of flesh” and the “eyes of resurrection,” are therefore necessary in order to conserve and enhance that gaze throughout our lifetime, as it tends to blur with the passing of the years.

Mercy looks at the horizon 
We are not merciful to just anyone, but only to those who are in a condition of error, fault, and sin–in a situation that has touched us personally and wounded us. The first pain at the source of the merciful process is what the merciful person feels for the wrong suffered.

That first pain – for treason, for a crime against us or others, for an injustice that touches us directly or indirectly – must be real and concrete. It is thanks to this first instance of suffering that the different look, the compassion for the pain of the other and the action aiming to heal the wound, are activated. That’s why mercy is born and exercised first and foremost inside our primary relationships of communion (in fact it is used in the Bible for the relationship between God and his people, for relationships with one’s children or friends).

The semantic field of mercy will not cross that of meritocracy. By its very nature, compassion is felt for the undeserving, for the person who deserves only contempt and revulsion. For this reason, we do not find it in the world of economics and big businesses, where it is not present and, if it appears, it is resisted because it undermines all the laws and rules of justice governing the markets that know and practice only the merit-based logic of the “big brother.”

Yet mercy is unwise, partial, skewed, unbalanced, and biased. That’s why capitalism cannot love; but if there wasn’t at least one merciful person in every organization or community, their land would be too poisoned by the toxins they produce, and no good fruit would grow on it.

Mercy, furthermore, has an intrinsic and necessary relationship to forgiveness. The forgiveness of the merciful, however, is forgiveness with its own characteristics. It does not need, for example, the repentance of the other, or that forgiveness is asked for.

The motion of the guts and the healing look are activated before the other has acknowledged their guilt and converted – although repentance and contrition are favorable to activation of mercy. The father waited for his prodigal son on the doorstep when he was still consuming his last resources with prostitutes and when he was eating with the pigs.

His standing at the door to look toward the horizon was already mercy. He had “seen” him even when “he was far away.” And he will run to meet his son, kiss him and embrace him even before checking on his repentance and conversion. Nothing is more unconditional than an act of mercy. Nothing is freer. Repentance and conversion are often a result of mercy. The “I will arise and go” (Lk. 15:18) is very often a mysterious effect of the mercy of someone who, maybe without our knowing it, started to think about us and look at us inside their hearts with eyes of mercy and healing.

We will never know how many departures of liberation have begun from the darkest conditions because someone looked at us with mercy – perhaps while we slept – and healed our wound in his soul this way. And one day we found ourselves able to get up, to get back on the road. The earth is full of roads to liberation from very deep moral and spiritual traps assumed in the heart of the merciful. Rebirths begin by rising in the heart of the person who looks at us with the eyes of a mother.

Compassion follows mercy. We can discover, and be surprised, that we are able to be merciful because someone else before was merciful to us. When it comes to mercy, the “me” precedes the “I”: someone loved “me” and cared for “me” with their guts and with their eyes, and so “I” am able to do the same.

There is reciprocity in receiving and giving mercy. This is important especially when we are little and young, and when we feel small. Behind someone who is capable of mercy, there is hidden, invisibly, the many merciful faces who have given that person the possibility to be merciful.

Luigino Bruni

Some of these thoughts were first published in the Italian newspaper Avvenire and in the Economy of Communion website: edc-online.org
This version has been adapted to the Philippine context.