Especially if we feel ourselves convinced of our right action in this or that aspect of our common life (whether that area be in religious practice, or in regards to social justice, or the environment, or the rights of the pre-born, or any other issue, really) then our own smugness can translate into a sniping judgmentalism and a sense of personal moral superiority. The failings of our neighbor surreptitiously reinforce this sense of superiority. It is only a short distance from a smug “I wash and recycle cans every day, I fast from meat once a week, and I protest at the site of injustice once a month,” of a contemporary “goody two-shoes” to the “O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity: greedy, dishonest, adulterous… I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income” of the Pharisee in Luke 18.
Through Proverbs 21, the Lord warns us: “All the ways of a man may be right in his own eyes, but it is the LORD who proves hearts.” Especially if we find ourselves self-assured about our own place in the “virtuous meritocracy” of civic society, we should take note that this page of scripture says that the one who has no pity for his neighbor is the “wicked man” who thereby desires evil, for anyone who will not have mercy “desires evil,” no matter how virtuous his excuse seems to be. The more you take note of your own merit—the hours you have worked, the days you have fasted (dieted?), the landfill space you have saved, the carbon you have offset, the rosaries you have prayed—the more these things, “necessary” though they may be, risk getting in the way of the true Life that cannot be reduced to any of these things. These things are the “sacrifices” that the Lord does invite us to, but “mercy is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Mt 9:13). For “he who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor will himself also call and not be heard.”