May 12, 2005

There is a beautiful passage in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermon to Clerics on Conversion that reads: “Mercy’s natural home is misery. Indeed it happens that misery becomes the source of man’s happiness when humiliation turns into humility and necessity becomes virtue.” What it seems to me that Saint Bernard is trying to say is that the very thing that seems to be our greatest disadvantage, namely our misery, can be transformed by God’s mercy into perhaps our greatest spiritual blessing. That is, when we become deeply and undeniably aware of just how weak, wretched and sinful we really are, in that moment is miraculously born the virtue of authentic humility – one of the principal virtues in the Christian life and the key to genuine happiness. In addition, our desperate need for God’s grace and mercy becomes itself the virtue of total dependence on the power of God to be able to do anything good.

The power of Christ is such that He can take that which we most despise in our lives and transform it into a privileged means of our own transformation.

Fr. Herald J. Brock, CFR
Local Servant, Convento San Serafin, Comayagua, Honduras

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