By DONALD DeMARCO
When we do not hear another person’s words correctly we say, “I beg your pardon.” A moderator appears on stage and apologizes for a momentary inconvenience by saying to the audience, “I beg your indulgence.” These words flow easily from our lips, usually without much reflection. They have become automatic responses, polite gestures, clichés. On reflection, however, they identify the speakers as “beggars.”
Now, we think of beggars as unfortunates with whom we do not identify. And yet, in the eyes of God, we are all beggars, beggars for mercy. We are prone to dividing people by class, wealth, ability, station, and pedigree. Yet, despite our proclivity for feeling superior to others, the one common denominator that unites all of us is that we are all beggars. When we sin, we should say to God, “I beg your pardon.” When we fall, we should say to Him, “I beg your indulgence.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem, Lady Clara Vere de Vere, shows his contempt for dividing people according to rank when he writes:
Howe’er it be, it seems to me,
’Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.
We often mistake humility for humiliation. Therefore, we might find it humiliating to be characterized as a beggar. But it is an act of humility to see ourselves as beggars before the footstool of Christ. Humility is the virtue that allows us to see ourselves in our truth. Pride is the vice by which we see ourselves as something that we are not. When we receive mercy, our humility is rewarded. Pride is usually followed by a fall.
When Queen Elizabeth donned her coronet, she did so with gratitude for God’s Mercy and with service toward others foremost in mind: “Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are gone but a declaration of our hopes for the future, and for the years I may, by God’s Grace and Mercy, be given to reign and serve you as your Queen.”
Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz (now retired from the Diocese of Lincoln, Neb.) illustrates the point that we are all beggars in relating a most interesting account of a meeting between a fallen priest, who had lost his faith and had descended to the level of being a street beggar, and St. John Paul II.
The meeting was set up by a chance encounter between a priest (let us call him Fr. M), who was a friend of the bishop, and the fallen priest, a former colleague of Fr. M’s from the seminary. Being moved by the priest/beggar’s plight, Fr. M promised to pray for him.
“Lot of good that will do,” the beggar cynically replied.
Fr. M, who had been scheduled to meet with the Pope, informed the Holy Father of the encounter he had with his former seminary classmate earlier in the day. The following day, John Paul arranged a dinner for the two priests. Before the meal was over, the Pope asked Fr. M to leave the room. And then, an extraordinary thing happened. The Holy Father asked the beggar to hear his Confession!
Astonished, the beggar replied, “Me! How could I? I’m just a beggar.” The saintly Pontiff clasped the man’s hands in his and said, “So am I.” After hearing the beggar’s Confession, the Holy Father reinstated the beggar’s status as a priest and commissioned him to minister to the other beggars in the parish.
“A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just,” as Pope Francis would later state.
The virtue of graciousness is closely aligned with that of mercy. It is the perfect opposite of snobbery. The gracious person does not allow social barriers of any form to prevent him from expressing his merciful care for others.
The distinguished psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, personifies this beautiful virtue. One night at about 3:00 a.m., he was awakened by a distraught woman who spoke incoherently to him for about twenty minutes. Sometime later, the woman met Frankl and thanked him for saving her life. The eminent doctor confessed that he was too sleepy during her telephone call to have been in any way helpful.
“But,” she said, “the very fact that a great man such as you would spend twenty minutes on the phone at three o’clock in the morning with a complete stranger such as myself meant that I must be important in some way, and so I decided to go on living.”
Graciousness is being merciful to strangers as well as to the sick, the needy, and the homeless. God is merciful to us despite the fact that He is the Creator, and we, having been drawn out of nothingness, are finite creatures.
The best way to be eligible for God’s mercy is to be humble, and by that virtue, be united to all others. The best way to be ineligible for God’s mercy is to be proud, and by that vice to think of oneself as better than others.
The Pope is “the servant of servants.” He is the humble servant who serves anyone, and without distinction. It is the view of the world that divides people into those who are superior and those who are inferior. But the world does not seek mercy; it seeks applause. We should praise God and not look to Him to praise us.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review.
(His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Ten Major Moral Mistakes and How They Are Destroying Society; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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