Oh the sisters of mercy,
they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me
when I thought that I just can’t go on.
And they brought me their comfort
and later they brought me this song.
Oh I hope you run into them,
you who’ve been travelling so long.
Yes, you who must leave
everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family,
but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging,
I think I can see how you’re pinned:
When you’re not feeling holy,
your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.
Leonard Cohen
Mercy: Clemency and compassion shown to a person who is in a position of powerlessness or subjection, or to a person with no right or claim to receive kindness; kind and compassionate treatment in a case where severity is merited or expected, especially in giving legal judgment or passing sentence.
Oxford English Dictionary
May we not succumb to thoughts of violence and revenge today, but rather to thoughts of mercy and compassion. We are to love our enemies that they might be returned to their right minds.
Marianne Williamson
Have you ever stumbled across a word that you have heard a thousand times and wondered, for the first time, what it really means? This happened to me recently with respect to the word `mercy´. A week of research and contemplation have produced some interesting results.
To the ancient Romans, the Latin word merces meant `price paid for something, wages, or reward.´ The early Christians of Rome used the word in a slightly different way. For them it meant the spiritual reward one receives for doing a kindness in response to an unkindness.
The word came into early French as mercit or merci with much the same meaning as was later passed on to our Modern English word mercy. But while mercy in English now has the meaning `kindness or pity shown to someone,´ the word merci in French has lost much of that meaning and is used today to mean `thank you´.
That was the first new discovery form me, the connection between mercy in English and merci in French.
For my reflections, it is perhaps important to provide context so that we can understand the circumstances in which the term first came to my attention. As someone who grew up in an austere variant of the Roman Catholic tradition, namely the Irish manifestation, I can recall often hearing `Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy´ during Sunday mass, the attendance at which was mandatory.
This experience was very much influenced by the prevailing image of a punitive God, all rules, and no mercy. I imagined the delinquent (me) kneeling before a fierce figure of authority (God) pleading for mercy in the hope of averting the worst degree of punishment (eternal damnation in hell), which was of course deserved, in the light of my unworthiness and the scourge of Original Sin.
If this sounds dramatic, it was. Remember, these signals were being picked up by the ears, heart, and imagination of a very young child. It is made even more dramatic by the repeated chanting of `Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy´, in unison, by the congregation in the overfilled church every Sunday.
Since those dark days of religious, indeed spiritual abuse, I have fired the punitive God and shifted to an image or concept of a loving God, a force field unconcerned with punishing, but rather providing security and solace, while encouraging us to become more loving to self, others, and circumstances as we make our way through life.
One of the events which came up in my recent contemplation concerned something that happened over forty years ago, when I was sixteen. It was in the late summer and autumn of 1977. As the oldest child still living at home (four older siblings were already away at college, five younger brothers living at home), it fell to me to support my parents in running the household and raising the younger boys.
Sixteen is an age at which helping in running a household is not generally at the top of the list of priorities. There was rock ‘n’ roll, the discovery of alcohol, weed and socialising, and the prospect of sex. Keen on becoming financially independent, I had already taken my first weekend job at the age of eleven. There was also school, where maintaining top grades was demanding more and more effort with each new term, with mine sliding downwards.
In the spring of that year things took an unexpected turn. Dad, aged 51, had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He underwent surgery at Easter and was sent home with a prognosis of `between one and twenty years´. He would not make even the one.
After a brief improvement in early summer, his health began to decline before school began in the autumn. The cancer was spreading, and he finally became bed-ridden soon after the beginning of the new term. There was much in terms of dismayed whispered deliberations among the older siblings and our parents’ generation, to which I was not privy. The situation seemed hopeless and there was much anxiety in the air.
I began to spend most of my time after school with Dad, reading to him, helping him as he became more debilitated, and providing companionship. I would have given anything to secure a recovery of his full health, while recognising that this would require a miracle. Perhaps I could save him.
Let me take a detour here to my recent activities in connecting to my Inner Child as part of my ongoing psychotherapy. With each passing year, the trauma of my childhood continues to unfold, memories and emotions bubbling up to the surface of my consciousness from time to time.
The goal of Inner Child work is to re-parent those aspects which had been wounded while growing up. In order to cope as children, we push these parts deep into our unconscious. These suppressed emotions have a habit to re-surface later in life when we are ready to deal with them. It has been quite easy to connect with the boy of younger ages (infant, two-, five-, seven-, and ten-year-old) but connecting with the sixteen-year-old had proven very difficult.
There is always a plausible reason for any resistance which arises in such a process. Perhaps it is the fear of re-feeling some original pain or simply defiance for having been ignored for so long, once the distressing memories had been suppressed. Aware of these dynamics, my commitment was to invite the sixteen-year-old to join me each time in my silent hour of morning meditation. We had been making good progress over the past month.
Last week, while sitting in silence, the energy field of Dad’s suffering and my yearning for his return to health became present. I simply sat there, feeling those old feelings, without judgement or evaluation. Then, suddenly, something alien began to bubble up from the depths. It was a different quality of energy, directly in conflict with what had been familiar to me thus far.
It was shot through with anger and resentment in response to the harshness of the punitive God who was about to take my father from me. The same God who taught the denial of sensual satisfaction, tenderness, and idle beauty. All this severity was embodied in the messenger who had been inculcating the ideology of this world view as long as I could remember, Dad.
The message and the messenger merged, and an unholy voice made itself heard for the first time since the actual occasion of its emergence over four decades previous. `I’ll be glad to be rid of him´, it said with deadly determination. A chill rose up through my spine.
At first, I sat there, crossed-legged in silence, in a state of shock. Then, simply allowing the conflicting emotions to be present, another voice alerted me to the fact that, under those circumstances, it was no wonder that such anger and resentment would develop. `Welcome to the human condition,´ it gently said.
This voice encouraged me to have compassion for all involved; the boy, my dad, the other members of the family, and the adult person that I am today. It informed me that, once out in the open, the resentment could now be relinquished.
Once relinquished, after some time it slowly dissipated.
It felt like this was my first conscious, deep personal experience of mercy. I began to get an inkling into the wonder of its true nature. There is no doubt that part of this experience implies extending the same mercy to others, as my journey continues to unfold.
My days since then have been marked by a deep sense of wonder and gratitude.
