Mercy Part 5 - What Mercy is not

"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as real strength" -St. Francis de Sales

Some of the great feedback I've been getting about this series on mercy has reminded me it's time to talk about what mercy isn't.

In thinking through the practical implications of mercy in my own life, I'm struck by just how easily mercy can be confused with things like avoidance, passivity, turning a blind eye to injustice and unfairness, and even weakness.

I expect that most of our expressions of mercy will be imperfect at best. While we'd like it to be clean and straightforward, it seems that most expressions of love between humans involve complicated and messy dynamics.

So while I wholeheartedly advocate for the practice of receiving and giving mercy, I'm wary of any approach to mercy that implies a simplistic formula for the practice or posture of mercy.

When I suggest mercy is meeting others at the point of their weakness with gentleness and kindness, some of you will wonder what that looks like when applied to dealing with those particularly chronic and difficult situations that come with commitment and love.

What about that alcoholic family member who's been causing all sorts of hurt and destruction with their behaviour. What does mercy look like when they're drunk, out of money, destroying their families, or failing to acknowledge they even have a problem? Do we ignore it? Do we take care of them? Do we talk about it or not talk about it? Where does "tough" love come into the picture?

Tough questions with no easy answers.

But I think the quote at the opening of this post by St. Francis de Sales, a 17th century Jesuit might help us. He writes, "there is nothing so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as true strength". Interestingly this phrase was re-popularized by a famous preacher of the early radio era named Ralph W. Sockman. Their idea might seem peculiar to us, but only because we mistakenly associate gentleness with weakness. Both Sockman and de Sales present this idea drawing from their observations of God. In Jesus we see a gentleness that brings with it the strength to melt even the hardest of hearts, and a strength expressed with gentleness that many of us find disorienting because it hardly matches what we believe about power and authority.

Here are some things I think that mercy is not:

1. Mercy is not the same thing as endorsing the behaviours of other people that are expressions of their weakness and brokenness. In mercy we meet others with gentleness and kindness, but it's not the same thing as supporting them by pretending that their actions are good or welcome. You might have noticed how in popular culture problematic behaviour is not only endorsed but sometimes made into a kind of virtue. We do this with workaholism. We also do this with shaming and personal attacks. Often we hear people's rude and unkind words justified as "just telling it like it is", or "just keepin' it real". We exchange the unfettered cruelty and shaming so common in public speech and turn it into something that becomes admirable in the form of so called "authenticity". Donald Trump is portrayed as being more authentic than his fellow candidates who are life-long politicians because he speaks his bigotry openly. But in mercy - we encounter the brokenness of a person like Donald Trump not by welcoming his bigotry and dressing it up as refreshing honesty - but instead calling it for what it is. Mercy openly challenges the attitudes and behaviours, without condemning the person or seeking his demise.

2. Mercy is not the same as being a door mat and letting others run all over us. It is not an invitation to the world to abuse us, or a spiritual justification for staying in relationship with those who mistreat us.  This really can be complicated.

Do we suffer because the weakness of others impacts us? Yes.
Do we perhaps suffer most from the brokenness of those we love because we are more vulnerable to their failings? Yes again.
Is it likely that entering into loving relationships will automatically bring us into hurt from the other person? I think so.
Do we cut and run whenever their weakness hurts us? No.
Do we stay in the relationship no matter what they do to us, no matter how they harm us  - as an expression of mercy? No.

When it comes to dealing with the fallout of others' failings there's a difference between being an unintended victim of stray fire versus being the deliberate target of abuse or harm. Mercy is open to healing and reconciliation with those who hurt us - but reconciliation at some point requires that the person who has hurt us must actually change. To say sorry may facilitate forgiveness. But to truly reconcile, the offender must repent (change direction) and engage in a process in which safety and trust can be restored through demonstrating change.

3. Mercy is not the same thing as being passive. Sometimes in the Christian tradition we've engaged in some mirky thinking about mercy and being a servant to others. We've invoked the image of "laying down one's life" as a kind of spiritual justification for being passive: by which I mean living as if only what others want or need matters, and what we want or need doesn't matter at all. The opposite, which is aggression - living as though only what we want or need matters and giving no consideration to others, is not the only option. Assertiveness, the state of acting and being in which both what I need/want matters and what others need/want matters as well. Assertiveness is the middle ground, and likely where we find our posture of mercy most often. The truth is that letting others have their way all the time, is not an expression of mercy or love, because it's simply not good for them to be allowed to mistrust us or others. If we think that putting up with abuse is merciful, we're fooling ourselves. Sometimes we love (express mercy) by refusing to let others harm their souls by being destructive towards us. Martin Luther King captured this when speaking about the civil rights movement: "The festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are struggling to save the soul of America". Mercy cares for the soul of perpetrators not by passivity, but by naming injustice and calling for repentance.

4. Mercy is not the same as tolerance. Putting up with others when we're hurt or bothered by them, is really just avoidance. Tolerance often seems like a civilized or enlightened way to be kind, but so often it masks true feelings or needs to avoid confrontation or conflict. Mercy is not conflict avoidant, because kindness and gentleness are not the same as being pleasant or nice.

Mercy is strong. It can be direct and confront things that are wrong. Because mercy belongs within the bigger concept of love, it wants the best for other people. So being merciful doesn't just let people stay where they're at with their weakness - it invites them to restoration and change.

But mercy isn't intolerance either...at least not in the kinds of aggressive ways we're familiar with. Mercy is different from aggression because our in our engagement with the other person we are not turning to hostility, dismissal, or retribution in our approach. Mercy may be very direct in confronting others about their weakness and failure, but it refrains from blaming, putting the other down, demanding compensation, or using the situation to gain some kind of advantage in the relationship. Ironically, when many of us think we're being merciful by ignoring what others have done to us, we wind up expressing our hurt and frustration in more passive-aggressive ways that aren't merciful at all.

5. Being merciful is not the same as choosing to be a martyr for our own cause. Some of us take on a self-imposed martyr role where we deliberately choose to suffer in order to satisfy the wishes and needs of others. There's nothing wrong with self-sacrifice, but I'm not so sure it's mercy if our primary motivation is to create or maintain an image of ourselves as a sacrificing or even victimized person. Sometimes we do this so that others will see us as the kind of saint who gives everything for everyone. And while it may appear we are meeting others in their place of brokenness with a kind of gentleness and desire to serve, it is not the same as mercy because martyr motivations are ultimately making it about how we will maintain an image of ourselves. Mercy is not a way of trying to earn God's favor or dealing with our own guilty feelings.

6. Mercy is not your point of entry to fix other people. We may incarnate God's love and presence to others in the midst of their broken humanity, but we are never the authors of other people's change. Those of us who grew up thinking we had a superior theology and way of life that others need to be compelled to agree with are particularly prone to allowing condescension to pose as mercy in our lives. We can even rationalize contempt by thinking of ourselves as helping others. On this I am an expert because of my own failure to understand how mercy is not imposing my solutions on other people . It is the tragic flaw of so many of us who teach, write, or engage in helping professions. Greg Boyle a lifelong helper to LA's gang members says, “Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” Mercy is that posture of awe rather than judgement. So often we help others as an expression of mercy, but it is a help than comes from awe, an awe we achieve by taking God's view of others, rather than our own human judgement.

Okay. This is one of the hardest posts I've tried to write, at least conceptually. I'm sure it's rather full of short-comings, but hopefully others will write back and help us all get a clearer picture of what mercy is and is not. Today may you experience and express that true strength that comes in gentleness.

Mercy Part 4- we will need more naps

What I'm learning in being merciful towards myself:

I am not defined by my flaws, mistakes, weaknesses, failures, or shortcomings. 

They are a part of my life, but they are not who I am. 

I'm also learning that you are not defined by your flaws, mistakes, weaknesses, failures, or shortcomings...no matter how often I view you in those terms. 

They are not what God sees when he looks at us. I'm sure he's aware of them, but they are not the defining image of who we are when he "sees" us. 

Mercy shifts the focus of identity from reducing people to their actions, status, or traits and moves it to seeing them first and foremost as kin....as fellow humans, as part of a family. While our minds are hardwired to sort everyone into various kinds of "other", mercy transcends this tendency and helps us reorient our perception. Mercy helps us to see other people as our brothers and sisters in the human race, rather than friend or foe.

Father Greg Boyle writes, “Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills in this way: we've just "forgotten that we belong to each other." Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen.” 

We categorize the world into various groups of "other" for a very important reason - it's efficient. Your mind has limited resources in trying to help you navigate an over-stimulating world.  Your brain simply doesn't have the time or the energy to pay attention and think through all of the things it encounters in a day. It must take short cuts. It has to rush to snap judgments and rely on assumptions and heuristics. But mercy invites us to view the world in way that's infinitely more complex. 

It's easy to think that I didn't get much written today because I'm lazy and undisciplined. There's a simplicity to that judgement and explanation that appeals to my brain that's trying to save more energy for more important things like....dreaming about chocolate cake or worrying about the Blue Jays pitching rotation next season.

It's easy to think about the millions of illegal immigrants working in the US simply as law breakers who need to be met with unwavering execution of the current legal statutes. Deporting "criminals" seems like such a sensible and clear way to resolve the issue. It's the real essence of Donald Trump's appeal - reducing complex chronic problems into simple narratives that appear to explain and offer easy solutions. Take away the human element, the functioning of systemic evil, or our own role in incentivizing the use of cheap foreign labor, and it's much easier to shift those mental resources to wrestling with say....the difficult issue of what shade of greige (grey-beige) I should paint my living room. 

And I don't even know what to think about how people should respond to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Apparently everyone else in the social-media world does. My non-merciful side is inclined to agree with militaristic options that fight back and annihilate those responsible. But mercy keeps prodding me to consider that the webs of brokenness that spawned, and the webs of brokenness that will result from these events are so much more complicated than simple "good guys vs bad guys" ways of thinking. These perpetrators are my brothers...as are their victims. We don't just forget that we belong to each other, we are motivated to forget that we belong to each other because kinship and mercy require an extraordinary effort. 

I think being more merciful will require me to take more naps. Pushing past my natural human tendencies towards black and white thinking and othering people is exhausting. It certainly takes a lot more time and energy. But it also pulls more deeply at me on a heart level. Seeing others as my kin invites me into a world of hurt and sadness as I begin to share in the suffering that humans inflict on each other. Beyond the cognitive inefficiency issues, I also want a dehumanized and simplified view of the world because I don't want to feel too much about so much of the world's suffering. I don't want to know their names or hear their stories. I don't want to find out that they had brothers or children just like me. I don't want to encounter their brokenness because I'm more than aware already of how much loss and struggle and misery there is.

So I'm going to need more naps because being merciful might keep me awake at night wrestling with the pain that all of humanity suffers.

I guess this is why mercy is not just another self-help gimmick to make our lives better. Mercy is better is for us, but it also costs us. It is a way to tap into the flow of love in the universe, but it comes at a price. As a posture mercy welcomes us into a beautiful and loving way of being in the world, but it also requires us to transcend our mammalian brain and enter into complexity and pain as we bring kindness and gentleness to our broken kin.

I'm going to go take a nap dear reader, so that when I wake up I can refuse to forget that you and I belong to each other. 

Mercy Part 3: When mercy brings death

Sometimes mercy doesn't feel good - it can actually feel terrifying. Mercy can even be like a form of death.

Hear me out:

All of us have rules about how the world works.

There are rules about who's good and who's bad, who deserves what, and what should happen to people when they break the rules that are rooted deep in our psyche.

Some of these rules we agree upon and they become cultural norms and sometimes they're even codified into law. But lots of us have a sense of justice that runs much deeper than what the laws of our particular jurisdiction predicate. And even when something isn't technically against the law, we often have a much richer and complex sense of ethics and morality.

Often we think that our rules about how things should be are universal truths.

Usually this takes the form of something like: "people should get what they deserve". Which, mostly relies on our personal sense of fairness to determine what it is that we and others deserve.

But sometimes mercy, for all of it's goodness, threatens to violate our sense of justice: our rules about how we expect or demand that the world be.

And mercy can really mess with this. Mercy can be disorienting, because sometimes mercy challenges how we think certain people should be dealt with. Mercy can feel like chaos because the order we try to impose on the universe is not always exactly the way God acts.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

But why do good things happen to good people?

We like to try to reconcile these questions with our sense of fairness, that people get what they deserve...even if only eventually. However at some point most of us are confronted with a reality that people don't get what they deserve. Innocent people are victims. Perpetrators seem to get away with things. And the quandary of mercy is that it sometimes feels like it's lining up with that world of unfairness - or at least letting people off the hook when we would rather see them punished.

Again, the story of Les Miserables captures this human difficulty with mercy. In the musical version we have this excerpt from the ruthless inspector Javert. The prisoner Jean Valjean, who he's hunted over 20 years for a parole violation, after serving 20 years for stealing bread, has the chance to let Javert die. But Valjean shows him mercy and lets him go rather killing him when he has the chance. Afterward Javert sings this:

    I am the law and the law is not
          mocked!
          I'll spit his pity right back in
          his face!
          There is nothing on earth that we
          share!
          It is either Valjean or Javert!
          How can I allow this man
          To hold dominion over me?
          This desperate man that I have
          hunted...
          He gave me my life! He gave me
          freedom!
      

          And must I now begin to doubt
          Who never doubted all those
          years?
          My heart is stone and still it
          trembles...
          The world I have known is lost in
          shadow
          Is he from heaven or from hell?
          And does he know
          That granting me my life today
          This man has killed me even so?
 
For Javert, the experience of mercy is akin to death. While he is not physically killed by Valjean, the world he "knows" is destroyed, amounting to a kind of psychological death. (spoiler alert: Javert kills himself after this song because the idea of living in the world of mercy - the idea of doubting his 

entire life - is too much and death is preferable.
 
Seem dramatic? I don't think it is. I think lots of us choose a kind of death while alive instead of 

living in the world of mercy. We narrow our lives, we cut ourselves off from the world in ways that 

isolate us from mercy because our vision of justice is so precious to us, so integral to maintaining a 

sense of psychic balance and orderliness, that we prefer it to what seems like a fair scarier version of death - living in a world of mercy.

Mercy is a gift. A flow in the universe we can tap into. But it comes with a challenge. Mercy 

threatens our claims to be arbiters of right or wrong. It threatens our illusions of control by suggesting that the order we want to impose and live by is perhaps open to being challenged and even violated when we treat people better than we think they should, or when we are treated better than we deserve. 
The religious people of Jesus' day hated him because he kept violating their rules and practices in 

favour of caring for people. He tells them, "go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy and not 

sacrifice'" He challenges their conception of how the sacrificial system (the religious purity laws) 

should be prioritized over the needs and care of human beings. He introduces the revolutionary idea 

that mercy should be prioritized over the law when it comes to dealing with people in their failings 

and weakness. Is it any wonder we have such a hard time following this Jesus who models a response to human brokenness that is at times so disruptive to our sense of how things should be?

I find the Jesus who's kind to the outsiders like women and ethnic minorities a beautiful thing. I have a harder time when he hangs out with tax collectors. Imagine Jesus going to a party with Bernie

Madoff, Donald Trump, and George W Bush, and loving them. That's the Jesus I find harder to follow.

Imagine Jesus having mercy on you. Imagine Jesus having mercy on you in such a deep and profound way that you can no longer be so hard on other people. 

Mercy brings a kind of death, because when we fully accept it, we can no longer hold on to our 

personal notions of how the world should work. It's that disruptive. 

It's so much easier to close our eyes to the flow of mercy in the world than to have to face the

challenge mercy poses to our categories of who's good and who's bad, of who deserves what, and of what we deserve. 

Perhaps it's a kind of death worth embracing. Maybe our egos and their sense of what

people deserve, need to die - to be crucified. It may feel suicidal - but it's not - because on the other 

side we find a life of abundance we can only dream of in our worlds of narrowly defined "justice" and "fairness".