Stage Seven — MATURE MERCY

What does the transformed person become?

A Word Before the Final Stage

My friend,

We arrive.

Three chapters remain. The first shows you the summit — what a fully formed heart actually looks like. The second brings it back down to the ground, because nobody lives on summits and a vision you cannot practice on a Tuesday is a decoration. The third gathers the whole road into one view and then lets you go.

I want to say something about the word that governs this stage, because it will be misheard.

Mature mercy is not softness of character. It is not the inability to name evil, or a vague warmth that never protects anyone. That is sentimentality, and this book has spent twenty-six chapters guarding against it.

Mature mercy is what happens when a person who sees clearly, who has been through the hospital, who knows exactly what human beings are capable of — including himself — chooses tenderness anyway, and finds after many years that it is no longer a choice but a disposition.

It is the hardest thing in this book and it arrives, when it arrives, as a gift.

One more thing before we climb.

You may be reading this stage feeling that you are nowhere near it. You may be able to list, quickly and accurately, the many ways you remain harsh, self-interested, and quick to judge.

Good. That is the correct position from which to read what follows. The people I have known who came closest to this summit were, without exception, the ones most conscious of how far from it they stood. The ones who believed they had arrived had merely stopped moving.

Read this as a description of a country you are walking toward, not an examination you are failing.