Mercy Beyond Us

When Dust Is Loved Like Eternity

“He does not treat us according to our sins nor repay us according to our faults.

For as the heavens are high above the earth so strong is his love for those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west so far does he remove our sins.”

Psalm 103 Grail Translation

There is a mercy that we can speak about and then there is the Mercy that shatters speech.

We measure everything. We measure effort. We measure prayer. We measure penance. We measure our failures and secretly believe that God must measure them too. We imagine scales in heaven. We imagine a ledger. We imagine a cold arithmetic of holiness.

But the psalmist says something that breaks the back of our calculations.

He does not treat us according to our sins nor repay us according to our faults.

If He did, who could stand.

We speak of repentance yet return again and again to the same poverty. We promise fidelity and then grow distracted by shadows. We profess love and then cling to our ego as though it were life itself. Our faith flickers. Our love is thin. Our resolve collapses under the slightest interior storm.

And still He comes.

For as the heavens are high above the earth so strong is his love. The heavens are not a little higher than the earth. They are immeasurable. They mock our attempts at comparison. His love is not proportional to our virtue. It is not activated by our consistency. It does not shrink when our fervor cools.

It is vast beyond us.

As far as the east is from the west so far does he remove our sins. East never meets west. The distance cannot be crossed. That is how He deals with our sin. Not by rehearsing it. Not by humiliating us with it. Not by keeping it near at hand as leverage.

He removes it.

We cling more tightly to our guilt than He does. We remember what He has already forgotten. We punish ourselves for what He has already carried into the abyss of His own Heart.

As a father has compassion on his sons, the Lord has pity on those who fear him. For he knows of what we are made, he remembers that we are dust.

Dust. Not angels. Not marble statues of virtue. Dust animated by breath. Fragile. Reactive. Easily scattered. He knows the chemistry of our weakness. He is not surprised by it. He does not recoil from it. He remembers that we are dust even when we forget and demand from ourselves a perfection that is not yet ours.

As for man his days are like grass. He flowers like the flower of the field. The wind blows and he is gone and his place never sees him again.

All our striving. All our building. All our reputations. Grass. A brief flowering. A wind. Silence.

But the love of the Lord is everlasting.

Not seasonal. Not temperamental. Not dependent upon our interior weather. Everlasting. It precedes us. It outlasts us. It will remain when our name is no longer spoken by anyone on earth.

A Mercy beyond us.

This is what undoes the religious ego. Not fear of punishment. Not threat. But the unbearable realization that we are loved more than we have ever loved in return. That while we were distracted He was faithful. While we doubted He remained. While we hid He searched.

His justice reaches out to children’s children. His mercy ripples beyond our lifespan. He weaves faithfulness into generations even when our own thread seems frayed and thin.

We are grass. Yes.

But grass loved by the Eternal.

We are dust.

But dust breathed upon by God.

If we could see even for a moment how He sees us, we would fall silent. Not crushed. Not condemned. But overwhelmed.

He does not treat us according to our sins.

He treats us according to His Heart.

And that Heart is without measure.