So when you make a mess of things, how do you treat yourself?
In your own experience of weakness, how do you respond?
Do you punish yourself? Do you view yourself with contempt? Does shame take over?
If you notice that you turn away quickly and try to sweep it under the rug, you're probably reacting to shame about your weakness - you just might be so good and fast at sweeping that you don't even get a chance to feel it anymore.
I think the difficulty we have in extending mercy to others, is primarily rooted in our difficulty extending mercy towards ourselves.
My contempt for other people's weakness is because I have contempt for my own. Yuck. What an awful thing for a psychologist to admit. The truth is, in my professional work I rarely feel contempt for other people because mercy and compassion are an integral part of my role. I've always loved that the therapy context allows my better self to shine through because of the expectation both patient and therapist have that I will be gentle and kind. But as a regular guy, I can be so hard on people. Ask my wife and kids.
Who gets angry at a 5 year-old for still needing help putting their jacket on? This guy. Yep. I can even recognize in the back of my mind that my kids ask for help at times not because they actually can't do it themselves, but because they want physical and emotional closeness with me. But still, I'm pissed off that I have to stop what I'm doing and help them. I'm disgusted by their weakness...sometimes even when it is age appropriate. But why do I do this? Because I'm disgusted by my own weakness.
And there's a real temptation in the midst of this honesty about my own lack of extending mercy to call myself some terrible names and apply labels...to categorize myself as some kind of monster. There's a temptation to make myself out to be less than human because I fail to live up to my expectations that I should somehow be more than human.
But God doesn't view me with these same unrealistic expectations. Nor does God degrade me below my humanity by calling me the awful names I call myself either. God sees me, and you, for what we are: human. Repeatedly, in the Hebrew and Christian and even Muslim scriptures God's character is described as inherently "merciful", or literally: full of mercy.
So a life filled with expressions of mercy begins with a heartfelt knowledge that God, however you understand Him/Her/It, is first and foremost merciful towards you. In recognizing God's mercy towards us, we can begin to be merciful towards ourselves, and eventually merciful towards others.
1 John 4:19 says that, "we love because He first loved us". If mercy is a form of love, than it's also true that we are merciful, because He is first merciful to us.
When I being to deal with my weakness in the way that God deals with weakness -mercy- I am free to move past my contempt for myself. When I stop encountering my failures with contempt, I will begin to bring mercy rather than anger or dismissal or retribution to the way I deal with the weaknesses of my children and wife. And it's not just an intellectual exercise, although I think it could be helpful to have an explicit understanding of mercy. But primarily our capacity to extend mercy to ourselves and others grows out of experience - that deeper kind of "knowing" that humans have when we have been shaped by experiencing something in our own lives. When I experience the mercy of others towards me, I am able to give mercy to myself and to others.
Perhaps nowhere else in literature is this so clearly illustrated as in Victor Hugo's: Les Miserables. The story centres around Jean Val-Jean, a man who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family and endures the "justice" of 30 years in jail as a result. When he is finally released the merciful act of a priest allows him to start a new life, in which he devotes himself to acting mercifully to others, even those who were unmerciful to him, and particularly the ruthless inspector Javert.
In this exploration of mercy, one of the points Hugo seems to be making is that mercy that is given, largely grows as a response to mercy that has been received. The priest (a symbol of God's presence on earth) extends mercy to Jean Val-Jean, who in turn extends mercy to others. Not because mercy is some form of cosmic chain-letter, but because mercy transforms us at the core of our being.
So if we need to experience mercy in order to give it well to others, how do we get there?
Do we wait for something to happen in which other's can show us mercy? Do we intentionally do something terrible as a way of creating opportunities for others to be merciful?
I think mercy is woven into the fabric of the universe, and is ours to discover and experience if we are open to it. I think God and others are constantly expressing mercy towards us if we learn to pay attention to all the ways it is occurring but that so often we overlook in our chronic state of mindlessness. A friend of mine talks about the "flow of forgiveness" that is present in the universe. I think there's a flow of mercy too. It's a flow that contradicts survival of the fittest. It's a dynamic we can see everywhere that people are responding to each other with kindness and love rather than dominance and force.
I see mercy in the way my wife responds when I crash our car into an "invisible" post in a parking lot
I see mercy in the response of thousands of aid workers meeting the physical needs of a flood of refugees coming from Syria.
I see mercy from a neighborhood church that opens it's building to recovery groups.
I see mercy in a justice system when it recognizes that imprisoning people for minor drug related offences is futile and overly punitive.
I see mercy in a dad who is gentle with himself for failing to be always patient with his young children.
Where do you see it?
There's a reason why we cry when we watch Les Miserables, why our hearts are warmed by that story, and why it's the greatest selling musical of all time. It's because deep down we resonate with mercy. Our hearts recognize that it is an expression of the mystical force in the universe that changes people. The force that rescues all of us who are prisoners to something, and sets us free to become people of mercy ourselves.
Even today as we choose how to respond to ourselves in the midst of weakness, can we adopt God's merciful perspective in the way we think and feel about our failures?
May you find ways to tune-in to God's expressions of mercy towards you. May you sense the flow of mercy in the world and be changed by it. May you join the flow of this force that sets you free from the prison of your own self-loathing and hatred and makes you into an instrument of mercy in this world.
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