I grew up in a little town called Bloomfield, nestled in the rolling hills of the outer bluegrass in central Kentucky. Population 1100, Bloomfield was known for only two things – it’s annual Tobacco Festival and the fact that it was home to the company that made Kentucky Kolonel Flour and Cornmeal. Little did I know that while growing up, I was merely 20 miles away from one of the most renowned monks of all time – Thomas Merton, who lived at Gethsemane, a Trappist monastary about 10 miles south of Bardstown, KY. Here is a quote from Merton:
Mercy breaks into the world of justice and magic and overturns its apparent consistency. Mercy is inconsistent; it is therefore comic. It liberates us from the tragic seriousness of the obsessive world which we have made up for ourselves by yielding to our obsessions. Only mercy can liberate us from the madness of our determination to be consistent; from the awful pattern of lusts, greeds, angers and hatreds which mixes up together like a mass of dough and thrusts us all together in the oven. And mercy can not be obtained in the web of obsessions.
To say that Christ has locked all the doors, has given one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is an intolerable flippancy of the saved, then nowhere is there anyplace left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy, which alone is truly serious and worthy of being taken seriously.
— from Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton (New Directions Publishing, copyright 1970)
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A Far Country 