Have you ever wondered what mercy is?

Mercy is one of the fundamental terms of the charism of the Hospitaller Sisters, and is the central concept of the motto of our 22nd General Chapter “Clothe yourselves with bowels of mercy”. In this article we tell you about the meaning of God’s “mad love” translated into mercy and compassion, or Hospitaller mercy, for people with mental illness, who are the main recipients of the Hospitaller mission.

Mercy as a human virtue

In popular parlance, ‘mercy’ is associated with the feeling in the heart that leads a person to care for another, to help, to accompany, to understand, to sympathise, to forgive. Along these lines, mercy can be said to be the love that reacts to the misery, the suffering, the needs of others.

In order to have compassion for others, we need to see our own image in their face, to recognise ourselves in their experience of limitation and to accept it with humility and wisdom. On the other hand, the fact that we have been welcomed, understood, accepted, encouraged, forgiven, is vital for us to feel able to do the same for others. This evidence leads us to the conclusion that mercy is not a spontaneous fruit, but requires education, apprenticeship and constancy of effort.

Mercy in the Gospel

In the fullness of time, Mercy became flesh and came to dwell in the midst of men. Jesus Christ is the human face of the Father, the expression of the untiring love of a God who, in an extreme gesture, testifies to the priority of mercy by offering mankind the fullness of salvation.

He is the Alpha and the Omega, and his Passover is the moment of fulfilment in salvific history, the moment of total realisation of God’s mercy. The paschal mystery, rooted in the incarnation of the Word, is the last word of God in this parable of mercy that will continue through all generations; it is the real present of our history and the point of reference for interpreting the past and projecting into the future. In its light we perceive the story of a Father who generates a family in order to lead it and lead it back to Himself, in a process that unfolds between promise-fulfilment, anticipation-fulfilment. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16). If the incarnation of the Word constituted the great gesture of divine mercy, every page of the Gospel bears witness to it.

Mercy in the charism of hospitality

In his letters, Father Menni often combines the words mercy and goodness. From time to time he adds the word clemency, saying that God is goodness, mercy and clemency in his relationship with the human person and, in a special way, with those who find themselves in situations of suffering, of whatever kind, and is always attentive to help, to liberate, to save. And those who follow him in the ministry of hospitality must be recognised by the same characteristics.

Mercy in the hospitaller charism is: stability, faithful perseverance, total and gratuitous dedication to the point of giving one’s life to the service of the mentally ill; concepts which are linked to the lifestyle proposed by the Founder.

Reading the letters of Benito Menni, we can affirm that this apostolic goodness and fidelity
which characterise the face of hospital mercy have two twin faces: on the one hand, the face of maternal love; on the other, the patience and charity which must be the daily bread at the table of the sick.

A story of Hospitality and Mercy

Fr. Menni, Maria Josefa and Maria Angustias were graced by the Spirit with a charism whose core is the experience of divine goodness and mercy revealed in the Heart of Jesus and manifested in a concrete way in the actions of the Samaritan Jesus. This is the Hospitaller charism which gave rise to the new founding project of the Congregation of the Sisters Hospitallers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Through the Founders, the Spirit transmitted this same charism to the first Hospitaller community, thus beginning a history of Hospitaller spirituality.

Today, almost 143 years later, we continue this history of mercy and hospitality in the footsteps of our Founders. Today more than ever, we ask them especially to intercede for us so that, in this 22nd General Chapter that we are experiencing, we may understand what God is asking of our charism and mission for the next six years.