“Blessed are the merciful for they will receive mercy.” -Matthew 5:7
“You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.” (The Message).
Mercy is about understanding first. It takes a degree of understanding before one can ever care for anything or anyone.
I am a witness to my own journey of becoming a merciful man. As a boy, as a young man, as a middle age pastor; I do not consider myself to be a man of mercy. I thought I knew a lot and I offered to everyone what I had amassed. I offered knowledge but I do not think I offered mercy. It would take time—more time—more poverty of my own spirit; more mourning over my failures; more embracing meekness over power as the way to move forward; more hunger than thinking a bigger church was the answer to all humanities issues; more unlearning; more deconstructing; more disintegration; more re-shaping of my own soul—until I could grasp more than a seminary definition of mercy. I still have a long way to go to truly understand mercy. I am but a witness right now to what I think I know. That is all.
We learn in schools, universities and programs information on what we need to do as human beings, spouses, parents, pastors, business leaders, global workers, etc. But understanding is really different from the knowledge we have amassed along the way.
Life is the great teacher for us to break our illusions, presuppositions, and all we thought we knew to a more compassionate understanding of those in need—including our own selves.
I truly believe that this pandemic is undoing us; disintegrating our understanding of so many things and something we are all now in solidarity to re-learn how to be human; how to recognize the dignity of all human beings whether they believe just like we do or not. This is what mercy teaches us. This is what mercy offers us. This is why it takes Jesus’ very words in these beautiful Beatitudes to undo us in this pandemic era.
It takes time to understand. It takes time to really understand the power of mercy. Those of us in the first half of life may know a diminished understanding of mercy than those of us in the second half of life. Stay with me as I try to give words here.
Until one has become “poor”—there is little understanding of the plight of those who truly are poor. Until we become poor in spirit, those in physical, emotional, vocational and relational poverty look like mere statistics. Those stats on our TV’s and screens leave us unmoved. I well remember as a boy seeing the nightly news report the number of American soldiers killed each day in the Vietnam war. Now, with three sons in the Armed Forces and each having been deployed and one who is deployed at this very moment, I see those stats so different. I moan when I read the stats. I am moved when I hear of one soldier killed in some far off war zone.
Until we face the dire loss of something or someone, then we really only know an academic understanding of grief and loss. But, for the one who has truly lost what ever was once the most dear to them—then that experience and understanding moves them to a deeper understanding where lament, grieving and loss is truly possible.
Until the time that someone has felt the pangs of hunger for something more than bread in their gut—something that only a thirst for the Eternal can satisfy, then mercy eludes them. Oh, to be sure, one can do acts of compassion like provide a meal, send a card, make a phone call in such a time like this. We can all do that whether we are motivated by mercy or not. But being a merciful person—being a person marked by mercy who lives and exudes an ethos of mercy, is what Jesus is describing.
Mercy is a posture of the heart. Mercy is a way a person carries their soul through a hurting world, whether in the long halls of vacant office cubicles or watching people standing in long lines to be seen by a doctor in New York city on our television and iPhone screens. Mercy is how you feel when you now pass closed up shops and barred up restaurants and realize that every single person who is filing for un-employment is now being forced to live the beatitudes whether they want to or not.
Mercy knows that everyone is poor.
Mercy understands that all of us have something or someone we can mourn.
Mercy grasps that meekness, not strength is the new economy of the kingdom.
Mercy recognizes that bread alone will never truly satisfy anyone.
Mercy discerns that I must care for myself before I care for others.
Everyone of the above realizations is learned in time and more time than the first half of life offers us. It takes a long time to understand people’s need for mercy.
Again, I am not talking about feeling sorry for a child who has a bleeding knee from a fall on a bike. I am talking about seeing through the bleeding wound into the bleeding heart within that soul. That is an understanding that time offers.
I want to take this one step further and I know this will be controversial but I feel the need to express this more in the world of soul care and spiritual direction.
Albert Hasse, a Francicisan Friar, author and Potter’s Inn podcast guest has said that anyone who serves as a spiritual director should clearly be in the second half of life. When I questioned him on this, he said, “Until one has lived long enough to know pain and suffering, then there is a basic sense of understanding that is theirs to grasp. We can teach the academic side of offering wisdom, discernment and counsel—but what Hasse is telling us is that until there is understanding, there can be no real direction offered. Richard Rohr has explicitly written an entire book on this theme. Rohr has said, “In my book Falling Upward, I try to talk about the journey, the transitioning from the first half of life, the necessary suffering in the middle of life, and the liberation of the second half of life. In talking about True Self/False Self in Immortal Diamond, I'm trying to actually explain what it is we're finding in the second half of life--our True Self. If you don’t find or recover your True Self, you remain in the first half of life forever, as many people do. They think they are their occupation, their family, their culture, their religion; without the falling apart of what Thomas Merton called our “private salvation project,” without that falling there is no upward. In Immortal Diamond I'm calling the upward the True Self and I'm trying to explain what the True Self is.” ( I am aware that we will not all agree on this point and I am aware that there are exceptional individuals who are chronologically in the first half of life that are truly ‘old souls.’)
We learn to be merciful people when we recognize that all humanity is linked into God’s family. We become merciful as we admit that all our programs to help, teach and aid people need to be built upon one key principle: people need to be loved. People want to be loved. What people need is love—sweet love. God, in his mercy knew this and offered us this love in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of his one and only son.
It is precisely right here that Jesus becomes our mentor in learning how to become a person of mercy. He was called a ‘man of sorrows…one that was thoroughly acquainted with grief.’ Yet he was only thirty or so when he began his life’s work. Every wound he received as a child; every arrow that pierced his heart as an adolescent; every rejection he experienced as a young man—all tutored him to be a person of mercy—and perhaps this is why so many in need of mercy were and still are drawn to him.
To sit with the fact that our beatitudes are portals for us into life in the Kingdom and an actual way forward is remarkable to me. I hope it is for you. But why has it taken a pandemic to awaken us to these Kingdom insights?
Lord, have mercy!
Contemplative Question: Describe how you can extend mercy to yourself in the next 24 hours? What do you need? What understanding do you now have of yourself that motivates you to have mercy upon your own soul and the soul of someone you feel “care” for right now?