The little-one might want to cry and looks to you for your response. Your smile, your out-reaching hands, your gentle touch is the beginning of his or her rising. 

What would happen if your disappointment and anger at the child's failure were to show on your face and in your gestures? The child's image of self would be quite negative and the getting up again would be slower, if at all.

God's mercy is more than forgiveness; it is also about raising us up that we might continue learning how to walk in God's ways. Mercy is not merely a judicial action, a court decision. God's mercy is a relational gesture that flows from the very center of God's creative and sustaining love for us. 

When Jesus is moved with "compassion" for a person or the crowds, the meaning is not so much pity or even forgiveness. Jesus is pictured as being moved from deep down in His stomach where the emotions were thought to reside. Jesus is moved to reach out, teach, feed and lead His lost and fallen fellow humans.

Praying this week of the Exercises is meant to free us from the fear that God is judicially angry, or disappointed with our having fallen more than once. We are invited to receive His gentle touch and His encouragement to rise and continue learning what it is to be His disciple. 

Mercy is above all of God's works and we pray in the experience of letting Jesus be Jesus; "The One Who Saves."

So we begin this week celebrating our holiness which involves the truth of our needing mercy being embraced by the truth of God's faithful up-raising love. This mercy, this compassion, if received gratefully, will ultimately free us for the more important faith-walk into His future and our own. Pray gently, He came to save us not to solve us.