“Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.” 

– Alexander Pope

The inability or ability to move beyond our own inner rage or anger in order to forgive another often says more about our own inner and spiritual state than it is does about those who require or need our forgiveness.

We are unable to mature or grow when our egos are fragile and wedded to past hurts and internalising other people’s behavior. Storing up hurts and wounds and constantly regurgitating them in our hearts and minds or toward others stymies our openness and capacity to forgive and to reconcile.

As they grow older, parents and children must forgive each other for disappointments and the pain they caused each other. Into adulthood, some parents and children seem incapable of letting go of past mistakes and arguments. New events often trigger or reopen old wounds, problems and patterns of behaviour.

How often do we see couples bicker and row, with one or both of the partners constantly dragging up the past as well as perceived and real sleights and wounds?

The plea for mercy and forgiveness is one of the most ancient prayers in the Judaeo-Christian tradition by penitents seeking and celebrating divine mercy in private prayer and at public worship.

Throughout the Christian Gospels are those hungry and thirsty for mercy: the woman caught in adultery, the family of Lazarus, the publican, Peter after denying Jesus, the apostles panicked amidst stormy weather, the thief crucified alongside Jesus, and others pining to taste and see the goodness of the Lord.

Their common supplication: “Lord, have mercy!” Fr James Keenan, SJ, preaches that mercy is, “the willingness to enter into the chaos of others.”

For Christians, the God of Love is incarnate in Jesus Christ, who unreservedly entered into the chaos and mess of the human condition.

What a reckless act of love, so profound that we are compelled, in the image and likeness of the God in Whom we are wonderfully, brilliantly and awesomely made, to offer and to receive that very same gift of mercy. To be merciful is to act as would Christ.

We are irrevocably screwed up as human beings, seemingly broken beyond repair, or seeming repair or full or partial repair. Refashioned, renewed, forgiven, granted mercy, we keep breaking, smashed by our own hands and the hands of others, especially those closest to our heart.

Each of us is like a precious vessel, shattered throughout life by addictions, merry- go-rounds of self-pity, pathologies, personality kinks and disorders, Achilles heels, betrayals, brokenness, pretensions, hypocrisies, deadly sins, weariness and more. And, yet.

There is a glue that repairs the cracks: love. We are lovable, capable of love, because we are flawed. Perfection can be quite boring.

But reconciliation, forgiveness and mercy are wondrous. To be gingerly pieced back together by the loving hands and the courageous patience of a spouse, partner, parent, guardian, friend or community is joy incarnate.

We screwed up human beings are capable of unimaginable goodness and beauty. The most beautiful painting in the world pales in comparison to the capacity for love.

In The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, there is a dialogue among the Trinitarian community whose Divine Heart feels the sin and endless pining of the bodies and souls made in their image and likeness.

Christ, the Divine Mercy, is sent to smash the original sin of human beings who keep forgetting their original blessing of being crafted in the image of their Creator.

We are the ultimate expression in creation of God’s love. When we forgive, reconcile, and show mercy beyond measure we manifest the image and likeness in which we are wonderfully made.

Mercy can make old eyes, habits and attitudes profoundly new; unsettling and refreshing the terra firma on which we live and move, daring to have our being. If we are fortunate, we grasp with new eyes, what has been at work since creation, and which unfolds and continues in our being and consciousness.

Anger and rage keep us in darkness. They are blinders that do not permit the indwelling of light.

At the foot of the cross, we meet fellow weak and loveable souls seeking, searching for mercy. Blessed by our falls and terrible mistakes, we are invited to become more merciful toward ourselves and others.

A dear friend, a cancer survivor, who is also Jewish, wrote me a note a few years ago, after reading essays by author Marilynne Robinson. My friend, a veteran educator, wrote: “Most recently, I am reading her essay collection, When I was young I read books. In particular, I was moved by a piece she wrote on Moses and the way the Old Testament and Ten Commandments have been unfairly reviled by many scholars throughout the years as a violent and merciless tract supervised by a jealous and vengeful God.

“What is ironic, is that after all my reading of the Bible as a child, I never understood the ethical themes that she reveals in her essay.

“Indeed, it is in the Old Testament that there is mercy for the poor in the required gleaning and forgiveness of debtors, the release of all indentured servants and slaves after seven years, and many other citations that she weaves into her remarkable essay.

“Her Christianity is a beautiful vision as she evokes in her novel, Gilead, for example and in her most recent work, Lila. What is truly wonderful is that Pope Francis expresses this same open handedness that is, for me, the loveliness of a relationship with God.”

Robinson once observed: “Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”

The merciful Christ of the New Testament rescued the woman caught in adultery from being stoned to death by a mob of the self-righteous determined to impose on her a capital punishment.

The frightened woman was in need of love, compassion, tenderness, healing. Correspondingly, Jesus’s first response was mercy not recrimination, blaming, throwing more stones, shaming, fireballs of indignation, self-absorption and belligerence.

Fr James Martin, SJ, directly addressed the question of judging:

“But in the Gospels, it is God (or Jesus) who does the judging, not us. Jesus counsels his disciples not to judge but rather to show mercy. Indeed, Jesus not only counsels this, he demonstrates it by consistently approaching public ‘sinners’ with an offer of forgiveness rather than condemnation.”

When we are open to and offer or accept invitations of mercy, we upend and disarm the many disguises of pride, many of which try to seduce cum trick us into believing that we are well or good or better than others, though we may actually be spiritually numb or considerably unwell.

In demonstrating mercy we may begin to acknowledge and lessen our egotism, defensiveness, need to be right, wounded pride, self-absorption with our own pain, feeling sorry for ourselves, condemnation, self-righteousness.

When we offer mercy and forgiveness we begin to heal others as well as ourselves. How can we truly claim to love Christ, if we continue to store up and act upon resentments to those we claim to be made in God’s image and likeness?

Mercy is always an act of profound conversion!