"A Call To Mercy: Hearts to Love, Hands to Serve" from the Introduction

We do not find in her writings or speeches any elaborate explanation on the meaning of mercy.  However, we do find a rich heritage of a spirituality of mercy and compassion, as she experienced it personally and lived it out in her service of others.  The numerous and very concrete ways of being merciful lived out by Mother Teresa and her followers caught the attention even of the secular world. 

Interestingly, mercy is not a word that Mother Teresa employed frequently in her spoken or written work.  Nonetheless, she understood herself to be someone in constant need of God's mercy, not just in a general way as a sinner in need of redemption, but also specifically as a weak and sinful human being who depended entirely on God's love, strength, and compassion each day.  In fact, Jesus Himself had told her when inviting her to found the Missionaries of Charity: "You are I know the most incapable person, weak and sinful, but just because you are that I want to use you, for my Glory!"   This was Mother Teresa's existential experience, one so deeply rooted in her heart that it shone forth in her face and in her attitude to others.  She considered them, just like herself, to be in need of God's love and compassion, of God's care and tenderness.  She easily identified with every other human being: "my sister, my brother."  Her experience of being "in need" in front of God led to her vision of herself as one of the poor. 

Pope Francis tells us that the etymological meaning of the Latin word for mercy — misericordia — "is miseris cor dare, to 'give the heart to the wretched,' those in need, those who are suffering.  That is what Jesus did: he opened his heart to the wretchedness of man."

Thus mercy involves both the interior and the exterior: the inner movement of the heart — the feeling of compassion — and then, as Mother Teresa liked to say, "putting love in living action."

In Misericordiae Vultus (the official document establishing the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy), Pope Francis says that mercy is "the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path of life."  He says that his desire for the coming year is that it "be steeped in mercy, so that we can go out to every man and woman, bringing the goodness and tenderness of God."

This idea implies that our attitude is not from "above downward," as it were, where we think ourselves superior to those we serve, but rather that we recognize ourselves for who we are: one of the poor, identified with them in some way, being in some way in the same condition.  And this must come from the heart, since understanding involves our very selves.  Mother Teresa is a wonderful example of this principle. 

Pope Emeritus Benedict indicates the source of this attitude in Deus Caritas Est: "Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ."  It was indeed an encounter with Christ that made Mother Teresa embark on a new mission, outside her secure convent routine.  Jesus Himself was calling her to be His love and compassion to the poorest of the poor, to be His "face of mercy."  She recounted: "I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums — to serve Him in the poorest of the poor. . . . I knew it was His will and that I had to follow Him.  There was no doubt that it was going to be His work."  Pope Benedict continues: "My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift." 

Mother Teresa epitomizes this art of giving. 

Her heart," said Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa's immediate successor, "was big like the Heart of God Himself, filled with love, affection, compassion, and mercy.  Rich and poor, young and old, strong and weak, learned and ignorant, saints and sinners of all nations, cultures, and religions found a loving welcome in her heart, because in each of them she saw the face of her Beloved — Jesus."