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".

Mercy - Part 2: Extending Mercy to Ourselves

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.

Mercy - Part 1: Never saw it coming

Sometimes life flashes before our eyes and we realize how in an instant everything could be changed.

It happened to me last week when a neighbour of mine was backing out of his driveway and didn't see my daughters walking to school. Fortunately I saw him...and a tragedy was averted.

He was mortified. And somehow in my state of relief, I found the capacity to be merciful.

I don't tend to think about mercy very often, do you?

I've mostly assumed mercy was something a person in authority or power gave to another when they treated that person better than they deserved to be treated. Like a judge giving a lesser sentence than the crime deserves.  Or perhaps a teacher being lenient with a late assignment. To me, through most of my life mercy was reserved primarily for God forgiving our sins, and in the metaphor of penal substitutionary atonement: allowing wicked humans to escape from punishment.

And it may mean those things, but this week I've been experiencing a richer understanding of what it means to be merciful.

Mercy is the response of kindness and gentleness we extend to others in the midst of their weakness and failings. 

Where it seems so reasonable and natural to respond with anger, vindictiveness, retaliation, indifference, or a demand for justice - mercy chooses a different path. It chooses to be kind and gentle.

We can extend mercy to all kinds of people.

Sometimes to the stranger - how might we show mercy to the refugees of Syria?

Sometimes to our spouse - how do we respond when they hurt us?

Sometimes to our children - how do we respond when they do their own thing instead of accepting our loving guidance?

Sometimes to our religious leaders and institutions - how do we care for them in the midst of their failings to accomplish what we expect of them?

Mercy may not be so difficult when the infraction is small. But when we've been hurt or harmed by another person, it becomes so hard, maybe even seemingly impossible.

Part of my ignorance of mercy is a lack of conceptual precision. I always lumped it in that heap with ideas like forgiveness and grace and compassion. And likely this is so because they all do overlap. To me, forgiveness is the act of relinquishing the debt of another. Grace is any form of unmerited favour. And compassion is the concern we have for another.

But mercy is slightly specific in being an action of kindness towards another in their state of weakness. Mercy may be an expression of grace, it may involve forgiveness, and we may feel compassion in the midst of it. But it may involve none of those either. It is possible to be kind and gentle in the midst of weakness to those who fully deserve it, owe us nothing, and evoke little feeling of personal care or concern. You might even argue that mercy sounds a lot like love when you break it down, and I would agree. But love takes many forms of expression, and I think mercy is just one of the ways we love others.

Fundamentally mercy is a decision about how we will respond to the weakness of others. 

We are confronted with the weakness of others all the time. And those who are close to us bring expressions of their weaknesses most clearly and regularly, and they affect us most deeply with them.

Mercy is not easy, nor is it something we should expect ourselves to able to do in every circumstance. God's character is merciful - ours is not. We are becoming, but not yet like God. As humans we will find it very difficult at times to be merciful because most of us are relatively inexperienced in expressions of mercy. Like most things of value and character in life, mercy must be practiced. We must engage in an intentional practice of relating to others with mercy, learning to see the opportunities we have for it each day.

We talk in church about joining God in his mission of redeeming all creation. It seems such a grand and distant scheme at times. We struggle with the gap between our aspirations to be people engaged in mission compared to the reality of our corporate lives. We are frustrated with ourselves and each other about failures we have in accomplishing what we aspire to. But mercy is one of those specific and practical ways we can "be missional" without being fooled into believing that we must do "bigger" things to embody the kingdom of God. We can participate in God's saving of the world by being merciful in the small and the big of each day.

When our spouses live out their weakness.
When our friends seem to have abandoned us.
When our children don't listen or do what they're asked.
When our neighbours are selfish.
When our rights are trampled by the inconsiderateness of others.
When people we care about hurt us.
When the recklessness of others changes our lives in a tragic accident.
When leaders fail us.
When our values are attacked or violated.
When things that are sacred to us are scorned or ridiculed.
When we are betrayed.

We may not immediately recognize all of these things as signs of others' weakness...but almost always they are. They are expressions of failings and selfishness that are inherent in our human frailty. How we respond to them is an opportunity to choose mercy.

Most of us don't live lives where mercy is expressed in visible or dramatic ways. Few of us have opportunities like the bishop in Les Miserables who extends mercy to Jean Val-Jean by giving him a chance to restart his life with gift of those candlesticks instead of turning him over to Inspector Javert. (Did you know that the title "Les Miserables" can be translated: "the ones in need of mercy"?)

But the daily mercy we can give comes in those small moments of interaction when we choose to be kind rather than attack. It involves our tendencies towards "soft vengeance":  mocking,  criticizing, shaming, ridiculing, dismissing, or any of the things we do to place ourselves above those whose weakness we can so easily see. Instead of demanding "justice" as we define it, we take on God's perspective and meet people at their worst with an unexpected kindness.

My neighbour instantly learned his lesson about backing out without looking both ways- he has two small daughters of his own and I could tell by the look of realization on his face. But the other thing he didn't see coming was mercy. None of us do. Mercy is a shocking, life changing, better-than-you-would-ever-dare-hope-is-possible, gift from God. It allows us to be so much better than we could be on our own...and it might just save the world.

I think mercy is complicated and I want to unpack it further in my next post. But for now I invite you to rediscover mercy. Beyond our doctrinal notions of the place of mercy in the universe, I invite you to find and give mercy in your everyday mess. When weakness and its consequences invade your space, may you be open to trying on mercy as a practice, to yourself and to others.

“It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.” 
― Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings

God meets us in the imperfect

“The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.”
― Peter Rollins

Can God be known?...like actually known and understood?

Is God just a construction of our minds? Are we forever limited to worship gods of our own construction because our finite minds cannot comprehend something so transcendent, something so beyond us?

Is agnosticism the only intellectually honest position on matters of the Divine?

I'm haunted by questions like these. I have been most of my adult life.

In the tension between faith and doubt, I've come to realize that I can't fully say "I know" much about answers to these questions.

I've learned that asking questions, rather than having answers, is where true faith is born. My faith is deeper and richer and stronger because I also doubt.

The nagging notion that God is a conceptual idol has been particularly formative in my spiritual journey. Please understand, that I'm not suggesting God is only something we make up. Freud's idea that God is merely wish fulfillment is a false dichotomy. Institutional religion's claim to have a flawless and accurate depiction of God is I believe, equally flawed. God is a form of wish fulfillment for all of us in some respects. But God is real beyond our constructions. He or She or It is more than just a product of human psyches attempting to cope with a difficult universe.

I took my kids to a local Jazz festival not long ago, and their anticipation was quite high in spite of my attempts to describe it ahead of time.  Upon arrival, they discovered that it wasn't the kind of festival they'd envisioned - kids activities, rides, junk food - but rather a sparse gathering of adults listening to music of a genre my kids are mostly unfamiliar with. Certainly the event was not how they had construed it to be in their minds. I had warned them of this ahead of time, but the word festival, and their own wishes for how it would be misled them. That doesn't mean the festival didn't exist. Just because it was different than their minds had created, doesn't change that it was an event they could access. And, they even found some aspects of it a source of joy, but in ways they had not anticipated.

In the opening quote of this piece, Pete Rollins reminds us of the problems with naming (which is an attempt to describe) and even trying to comprehend God. Our humanity inevitably leads us to create false conceptions. And when life turns out differently than we expect, or when God turns out differently than we expect, it's easy for us to despair.

Many of you on similar journeys to my own have shifted away from trying to box God into propositional truth, and opted for a richer experience of the divine. This is a good path. For too long in the Protestant tradition God has been an intellectual exercise, almost a theological hobby. And experience might allow us to encounter God as God is, rather than in tidy conceptualizations that inevitably mislead us.

But experience is imperfect too.

Experience occurs through a set of lenses that also warp and skew our experience of the Divine. For thousand of years philosophers have stated what contemporary neuroscience confirms. There is no pure perception, conceptualization, or experience of anything, let alone the Divine. We are limited in this respect by our human brains.

On a public transit ride home from school years ago I had a eureka moment (out loud) where it became clear to me that one of God's answers to this problem is Jesus. That in the mystery of the incarnation, we are given the opportunity to encounter God in a way that helps transcend our limitations: He becomes one of us. Truth is no longer limited to ideas, truth becomes a person we can encounter.

In years passing, I've become more convinced of this truth, but also aware that even our experience of Jesus is imperfect. Even if the red-letter words of scripture are His exact dictation, we still encounter his words through our filters: our experience, our biases, our expectations, our wishes, our traditions, and even our church's dogma. And it doesn't take very much time hanging out with people who claim Jesus as their own, to discover that even our experiences of Him are shaped by a whole host of factors.

So what occurs to me now is this:

God meets us in the imperfect.

God shows up in the midst of our idolatrous versions of Him/Her/It, and allows us encounter with the Divine.  We can spend our lives worrying about pure theology or seeking pure experiences, but God doesn't need that, because God shows up anyway. In those places of brokenness and distortion, of misnamed deities and culturally defined worship practices, God shows up.

In your messy circus of a congregation, with so many barriers to authentic encounter, God embraces imperfection and meets you there anyway.

In your solitude - away from the obnoxious imperfections of institutional religion - but equally steeped in the distortions and imperfections of your own mind  - God finds you and is present nonetheless.

We may be limited by human brains, but God is not. We may be limited by constructed ideas and experiences of God, but God is not. The transcendent transcends our imperfection. It breaks through to hearts and minds and stirs them. It gives them glimpses of a Divinity that it cannot fully grasp and leaves them changed, but still imperfect.

Today, may you be honest about the distortedness and imperfection of who you think God is, and how you experience God.

But may you also stop looking for the perfect place to find God, and recognize God meeting you in the midst of imperfection.

Finding ourselves in Easter - Part 4

As part of our ongoing series on finding ourselves in the story of Easter, we continue to contemplate how various participants in the story might have seen it, and how their perspective can help us more clearly see.

In part 1, we thought about the perspective of the Roman soldiers - Jesus as irrelevant
In part 2, we thought about the perspective of Mary, Jesus's mother - Jesus as something we have been entrusted with, and the terror and grief of losing Him.
In part 3, we thought about the perspective of Pontias Pilate, the Roman governor, who wrestled with ambivalence about a potentially dangerous Jesus, who could bring changes he deeply feared.

In this final Easter post, we consider the perspective of Peter, the disciple, and the only person who is with Jesus throughout this story.

Finding ourselves in Easter - Part 3

As part of our ongoing series on finding ourselves in the story of Easter, we continue to contemplate how various participants in the story might have seen it, and how their perspective can help us more clearly see.

In part 1, we thought about the perspective of the Roman soldiers - Jesus as irrelevant
In part 2, we thought about the perspective of Mary, Jesus's mother - Jesus as something we have been entrusted with, and the terror and grief of losing Him.

In this post we consider the perspective of Pontias Pilate, the Roman governor. He had an ambivalence toward Jesus. On one hand he was interested, perhaps even curious about this unusual Jewish prophet who made such claims and did such unusual things. Jesus was unlike the other trouble makers of the time, he had an usual quality about Him that Pilate couldn’t quite put a finger on…..but at the same time this Jesus was a threat. Pilate had a little section of the Roman Empire to keep in order, and to open himself to really listening to Jesus would risk all kinds of trouble in his personal and professional life. It was just easier to get rid of him.

Finding Ourselves in Easter - Part 2

As part of an ongoing series of posts, we're thinking about how we fit in the story of Easter. In Part 1, I described how we might find ourselves in the experiences of the Roman soldiers - finding Jesus to be largely irrelevant to our lives.

In this post we contemplate Mary, the mother of Jesus, and how we can identify with her experience of that event.  

Finding ourselves in Easter - Part 1

As Easter approaches I find myself again contemplating how I fit into this story, and how this story fits into my own life.

The next few posts will involve an attempt to take the perspective of those in the story, and contemplate what we might learn from them.