Faith & Spirit Quote by Philip Levine

Levine’s line lands like a confession that refuses the comfort of theology. The first “mercy” is cosmic: a power “maybe a God” that doesn’t just withhold kindness but seems structurally incapable of it. The hedging “maybe” matters. It’s not disbelief so much as suspicion - a working-class metaphysics shaped less by doctrine than by experience: layoffs, factory floors, bodies worn down, the feeling that the universe runs on indifferent schedules. By calling that force “without mercy,” Levine sidesteps the polite God of platitudes and names the older, harsher one people meet in illness, accident, and economic cruelty.

Then the line pivots with a quiet, almost stubborn counterclaim: “And yet we find it, as I have, from others.” The “yet” doesn’t solve the first sentence; it argues with it. If the top of the moral hierarchy is cold, mercy becomes a human invention, a small-scale rebellion. Levine’s syntax makes that mercy feel earned rather than proclaimed: “as I have” suggests lived receipt, not abstract belief. He’s not preaching altruism; he’s testifying that people, in the exact places where systems fail, sometimes choose to be better than the world that made them.

The subtext is political without slogans. Mercy isn’t framed as a private virtue but as a social resource passed hand to hand - a kind of informal welfare, a union of the spirit. In Levine’s universe, grace doesn’t descend. It circulates.