What is Mercy?
I’m not sure if I’m qualified to be talking about the topic of mercy. I don’t know any more how to be speaking of mercy, or what being merciful looks like or what dreaming of a merciful life or society is. Recognizing the presence of mercy is even fleeting to me. Maybe it might be helpful to ask myself what mercy means?
Mercy means offering or receiving when being offered, help during hard times. Mercy isn’t something we earn or deserve. It involves releasing the unsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable, accepting life as it unfolds in front of our eyes. Mercy takes us to the miracle of an apology, to give and receive care and love. Mercy brings us to unashamed humility when we have made a mistake or neglected.
Grace, forgiveness, empathy, compassion are synonyms of mercy. These are all pathways we might consider taking when we look at the great big mess of ourselves. Our attachment to being right, greed, prejudice, aging, fear. Everything out there that makes us turn away from accepting life as it presents itself and performing acts of kindness and goodness anyway. Holding onto the belief that caring and love are woven into even the worst life has to offer.
Mercy means that we soften, even if ever so slightly. Like looking at the world through a new pair of glasses. When we put them on, we can see the condemnation for others being total shits, which is sometimes a projection of ourselves, a bit more gently.
We were born as merciful beings. Full of gratitude and wonder. Until we lost those parts of ourselves. We hid away those parts of ourselves. So we could become societally accepted, productive, admired by others, more armored and less vulnerable, with growing frustrations. We seem to forget mercy will still be there waiting for us to return to collect all the shadow aspects of ourselves and integrate those unclaimed and unlived parts of our lives we seemed to have tossed aside or lost. We awaken, if only temporarily at times. Becoming aware again of our human nature to see life as it is. So we can serve those who are suffering. To give as we are able to receive.
Life Is Messy
I have made it through 55 years if life. But when I reflect on some of the past in my life, I see a broken past with many mistakes and disappointments. I have also had some great opportunities and successes. I want to be a good person, living a good and simple life. I don’t want to be a letdown to others, when that is always a possibility. I want to learn from my mistakes so I can embody the fullness of presence to be in service to others more than to myself. Yet here I am living in Thailand, and I continue to fail and make mistakes regularly. I am one inconsistent, incompetent mess.
What about all the rules and guidelines there are to follow to live a good life? Principles to guide my life by and maps and recipes to show me the path so I can live an uncontaminated and orderly existence. The old and New Testament? The teachings of the Buddha? Then I stop hard in my tracks. I am reminded of the guiding forces in my life. The cultivation of connection and intimacy through the messiness of my life. Others have helped me see the reality of our broken and flawed lives. Not because we need to remove our flaws but, because we need to release the seeking of perfection. It’s not about being fixed. It’s about the acceptance of our gentle, kind, caring, loving, and at the same time, unstable, judgmental, critical, shrewd selves.
I don’t believe people who think they have life all figured out and give the impression everything is fine, when it’s not. Fake it ‘til you make it, or pretending, is much easier and straightforward. Answering the truth and speaking how you feel is more difficult sometimes. Honesty, from the person asking the questions, requires more of an investment of time, listening skill and openheartedness. Sometimes wishing the questions were never asked.
Pretending is the grease of modern non-relationship relationships that avoids any kind of commitment. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationship intimacy by connecting us on the basis of who we aren’t. People pretend to have real relationships because the exposure of our messiness is scary. But being real means the refusal to pretend or allow others to believe we are something we are not. When we are real, honest and vulnerable, our messiness is there for everyone to see.
I am, and we all are works in progress. Perfectly imperfect and incomplete. The darkness of our human flaws is visible in our hearts no matter how hard we try to hide them. To see the light, we must bear our darkness. The darkness in our heart becomes our own compassion towards ourselves. For until we recognize the evil in ourselves, we will not be able to discern the good.
It doesn’t seem I will ever be finished learning or complete during my messy life struggles. I can understand that for each of us to be placed into this physical reality puts us in a position of needing to struggle to survive. Yet, if we don’t have the struggle, we die and never learn to surrender. And we cannot stop the struggle until we learn to surrender.
One of the only things I know to do is surrender myself from my own will. Surrender to who I think are my enemies. In hopes we can become friends. To surrender my struggle against the laws of nature and capitalism and move into the forest. I am tired of suffocating in my own garbage and the garbage littering the planet.
A Generous Heart or Being Right?
Radical kindness towards ourselves and others give us an opportunity to practice and develop a warm and generous heart. Isn’t this what everyone wants? Or do I/we just want to be right? Can we have it both ways? I’m not sure that’s possible. As much as I want to believe a kind, warm and generous heart is the way, I also feel the desire to be right. The key to joy, is offering our unconditional kindness to all of life. Do I have to talk about this now or can I revisit this at another time?
I’ve wanted this softening, my surrender, into happiness. Does my wanting to be this way give me some points? The problem is, I like to be, and am regularly, right. Being right feeds my ego, makes me feel smart and good about myself and covers up any wrongdoings. The attachment to being right also takes precedence to being in relationship. One of my teachers would say, “would you rather be right or be in relationship?”
Do we offer ourselves and others a chance to come back from the self-created drama and toxic thoughts? Especially when the attachment to being right and the hurt seems to be the loudest voices in our heads. Where we get the chance to see how caring and love reaches out to us again and again, beckoning us to soften and come back.
But there is one problem: the mind. I am the notorious black sheep. The material that justifies my unloveliness is constantly accessible and available. My truth telling, talkativeness, psychobabble, pettiness, internal critic and judgment. When I am wearing these foggy glasses, I make myself believe I am surrounded by people trying to get something from me. Never getting what it is that I want. How should I be reacting to all of it? Isn’t that Coyote Trickster trying to get the best of me?
I can take a pause from being prickly, protective and judgmental. Stopping to take a breath. The next thing I can do is let others go from my grips, without needing or demanding an apology. I can stop the campaign and assault in my mind. I can start over. Cultivating patience and peace. Beginning again as many times as necessary. To get myself back to the place I want to be. Softening into the care and love that has been hidden inside of me all along during this onslaught. Wouldn’t this all be nice?
Cycles of Life
There turned out to be a time in my life when I realized I was losing my ability to be merciful. Both towards to myself and others. I realized the sense of comfort in my own skin was deteriorating. I began to retrace my steps.
Some people emerge out of healthy and adjusted families with happy and fulfilled parents who, if necessary, sought help for their addiction, anger, depression and grief, and who celebrated their children who were deeply different. Or so I hear. Maybe just shy of a handful of people I ever met. My close friends have most always been the children of absent parents, adultery, alcohol/drugs, betrayal, disloyalty and manic depression. But that’s just my own perspective. Or is that just how life is?
I know there are some healthy families out there. But I think most of us were raised by one or both parents with big problems. If one of our parents were in a bad marriage, or alcoholic, depressed, unhappy, chain-smokers, passive aggressive, silent, unfaithful or abandoned, we began as fetuses to marinate in the embryonic sacs of our mothers’ anxiety.
No matter how bad or lovely one’s childhood, almost everybody walking around was held, fed, and cared for, at least enough to still exist. The world gave us shelter, water, and food, and we grew. The human condition brought terror, and we wept in fear. The human family held us, in the best way it could. Then it inadvertently destroyed us. Allowing us to pick up the pieces and become whole again.
We were taught the exact opposite of what Mark Yaconelli calls the Rule of Love, “Anything that leaves you more fearful, more isolated, more disconnected from other people, more full of judgment or self-hatred, does not follow the Rule of Love—and you should stop doing it.” But while I was growing up, most things left me fearful and isolated.
The “Rule of Love” can be seen as a guideline for living with greater kindness, compassion, and acceptance—qualities that help heal wounds, bridge divides, and nurture healthier, more fulfilling relationships. Anything that leaves us feeling isolated or consumed by judgment (toward ourselves or others) only serves to reinforce walls, both external and internal.
Real life seemed to be setup to shine a light on our defects. It was natural to want a simple, smooth, sweet and slow life, but good luck with that. Things that didn’t work out stuck out for everyone to see and then we got whacked back down. It felt impossible to be in congruity with one’s true self. But at a certain age, I understood that I had a true self, and nobody managed to wreck it just yet. It was only a matter of time to emerge back into the merciful selves we are.
We Are Not Islands
It became easy to see my own imperfections. It also made it easy for me to see everyone else’s. We all see each other’s, so it was life in our fragmented life. As we used fashion, materialism, achievement, and irony as our armor. Because I had lost contact with the truth of my innately merciful self, it was almost impossible to have self-respect. But I always had a couple of friendships that saved me, fed me, and one or two teachers who got me, who got it, who shared the truth that life was amazing but also hard and weird.
One thing I learned and may be the only answer that helps make facing into life’s messiness, has been a deep connection with a couple of people. A friend, a teacher, a therapist, a lover, etc. The Buddha, Jesus, Allah, Moses, all knew they couldn’t control our lives, but could infuse our lives with their merciful teachings. I am grateful to have been graced with a few people over the course of my life to help me navigate life’s messiness. It’s a team effort, we cannot do it alone, no matter how much we think we can. The stronger person gets the other person water, listens when the other is in pain, applies lotion on irritated skin, and stays close. The weaker person has the harder job, of receiving all the care and love. Isn’t this what mercy is? The noticing, giving, caring, accepting, listening, helping, receiving, and most importantly, not running away.
When someone has committed to seeing us through our mess, and we have committed to do the same with that person. It becomes one of the greatest gifts we can give to each other. Hopefully by now, as we age, we know almost every aspect of ourselves, and thus of each other, the self-obsessions, the generosity, the ambition, the gentleness, the greed, the magic, the visceral, the animal, the divine, the silence, the mealy-mouthed, and we embrace the person, now and as is, unto forever.
Honoring Our Brokenness
I’ve said that I want to be part of and accept the great mystery of life’s unfolding. Rilke wrote: “I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” We tried as hard as we could to please everyone, from our friends, family and our jobs. To fill every moment with productivity. The elders said this would us bring satisfaction in life, and we would get the approval we seek, and others would like us more. But we also learned to sabotage ourselves. Our high achievement made us and everyone else look good, but we also seemed not to be in our own integrity with ourselves and the greatest good for all.
We fooled ourselves into false states of accomplishment, estrangement from ourselves, squandering our very short lives. Our self-importance was fueled by performance anxiety, people-pleasing, and bad self-esteem. We became good worker robots in crispy creased folded dry-cleaned shirts. Not getting strong from our mistakes and in our broken places. Although people talk about that was happening.
The Japanese have an art of repairing broken pottery by mending the breakage with powdered gold called, Kintsugi. It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to hide. Kintsugi says: We value our brokenness enough to repair it. So, it does not become a denial or a cover-up. It becomes the opposite, an adornment of the break with gold, which draws the breakage into greater importance. The gold becomes part of its beauty. Somehow the aesthetic of its having been cracked but still being here, brought back not to baseline but restored, brings expansion.
This is not what typically happens in much of our world. Most of the time we throw out the stuff that is broken, or do our best to ignore or disguise it, or cover it up, or patch the crack so we can still sell the item. We want nobody to notice we were once hurt and heartbroken. We do a dishonor to ourselves if we pretend that we have not lived a messy life or gotten wounded. When we pretend life isn’t messy, bottling our feelings, not allowing others to see who we truly are, we prevent others from offering us their mercy and compassion. To have borne our own broken hearts and seen such shattered lives around the world is what gives us a shot at becoming merciful people. We must be done with the pretense of being fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient, and the pretending to be happy. Because no one always is.
Compassion is Action
I don’t want my last words here to be about bad thoughts or behaviors or the doom of the end of the world. Grace, mercy, love, compassion and forgiveness seems like they need to have the last say. Although to transform ourselves and the world into a place of empathy and compassion seems like ultimate master plan. Because without compassion, little can be accomplished in the human struggle.
It seems like the conventional definition of compassion where we swallow our ill will and accept the mistakes of ourselves and others is limiting and only taking us so far. It certainly is a great beginning. But compassion cannot be passive. Our culture of blame and shame is passive. As we wait to be punished for some perceived wrongdoing. This is where compassion needs to become action. Proactively seeking what others need the most and offering it to them. A thief stealing gold, needs something else, not the gold.
This change in how we look at compassion has the possibility to change the social order and our personal morality. Maybe we can finally realize we are each responsible for each other? Like the covid epidemic began to show us. This way of looking at compassion actively can make it our obligation, and maybe even a pleasure, to find what everyone we encounter needs the most and give it to them.
Mercy, Mercy, Me