Last month, in part I of this article, our friends Sarah and Patrick Williams talked about the nature of community and how our human frailty and needs build community, with examples from their family life. This month they focus on mercy in building community.
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Sarah: We tend to think of mercy as love and forgiveness. But I remember reading a religion book with my daughters, not a terribly good book, actually, but there was a little golden nugget God put there: the author defines mercy as God choosing to define us by our best quality, by his truth.
This image of mercy as truth, of God seeing our deepest truth, goes very much against what the devil seeks to do. The devil is the great accuser. There’s this image of us, in our individual judgment, with the devil on one side, and what is he doing? He’s listing all these things that we’ve done, telling God, “See he’s not worthy, look what he’s done, look how many times he betrayed you,” etc.
And there is God in his mercy, together with Mary and the saints, pleading for you and trying to define you by the things you have done that are in accord with the deepest truth of who God made us to be.
In The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky is this amazing story. I call it “The Onion Story.” There’s this woman who has died and is in a place of great suffering and misery. Her angel goes before the throne of God and asks, “Is there anything I can do to help her? Is there anything that will save her?”
And God says, “Did she show any love at all during her life?” Her angel says, “Well, there was this one time when a beggar woman came asking for food, and she gave her an onion.” So God tells the angel to take the onion and pull her out of hell with it.
The angel takes the onion and goes down and reaches out to her, and she grabs onto the onion. He’s pulling her out, and she’s being lifted up by this one little act of love she once did.
Other souls around her see her being lifted up. They also want to get out, so they start grabbing onto her, hanging onto her heels and her dress as the angel is pulling her out. But she starts kicking them and elbowing them and making them go away. “No! It’s my onion; it’s for me!” As soon as she does this, the onion breaks, and she sinks back into the pit. Her angel goes away broken-hearted.
Dostoevsky points out two very beautiful truths. God is willing to define the woman by that one little act of love she once showed. He values that so much that it is enough to pull her out of hell. But as soon as she refuses mercy to the ones around her, she cuts herself off from that definition.
This is because God’s mercy has to be transformative. We are transformed according to the truth of who he made us to be, but the transformation has to lead to a real change in us: it wasn’t real for that woman, and so she could not be saved by it.
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Patrick: I tend to see mercy more in terms of the interplay between mercy and justice. Of giving a person their true due, but in the right way. God is always calling us to justice through mercy.
In another book by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, the main character, Raskolnikov, kills a couple of women because he thinks that as long as he gets away with it, everything’s fine; right and wrong are just labels we assign to the reality around us.
Then he encounters Sonia, who tries to bring him out of this pit. She tells him he needs to confess to his crime and ask for forgiveness. Eventually he does what she’s asking but for his own selfish motive of just wanting all this to go away.
He confesses, and the police put him in prison for a number of years. Sonia had convinced him to turn himself in, but she doesn’t stop there. She moves next door to the prison and visits him every day, bringing him all these things to make his time in prison as pleasant as possible.
Then she starts bringing things for the other prisoners too, to expand that love, to say, “I’m going to be as complete as I can in my mercy towards you in this moment.” Eventually he gets out of prison and she marries him.
You see this transformation of the person through her love, through her mercy saying, “Look, it is only just that you turn yourself in. It’s just that you suffer in prison. But I’m going to enter into your suffering as deeply as possible. I’m going to experience this with you, and I’m going to try to lift you up in it as much as I possibly can, with every fiber of my being.”
Mercy means going to the depths with the other person, which is what our Lord did with us on the cross. He went to the depths of human suffering and entered into our mess.
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Sarah: It can be very hard, as a married couple, to fail in front of each other — to be too harsh with the kids, to lose your temper and yell, to make a wrong judgment or to make threats. When I do this in front of Patrick, I immediately feel the injustice of what I have done. But then he enters into that moment with mercy, not berating me but immediately trying to improve the situation.
If we’re trying to get them ready for bed or to do their chores, he tries to lift up the kids in a way that will help everything run more smoothly. Mercy is never saying that wrong isn’t wrong or that our actions don’t have consequences, but it’s entering into it with them. Bearing it together.
In our marriage we bear each other’s mistakes. And even when one of us makes a wrong judgment, we still try to support the other, accept the judgment as if it were our own and then work together from there.
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Patrick: I’m a disciplinarian, and when our kids do something wrong, I punish them. What’s really hard, though, is when they do something, and you think, that was really my fault. I could have prevented this situation and I didn’t. But I still have to go through with the punishment, because I don’t want to scandalize my kid by having them think that their behavior was okay.
But we found that one thing we could do is to ask ourselves, what was the root cause of this? Often I find that I haven’t spent enough one-to-one time with this child in a while. So I’ll punish them, and then maybe the next day, I’ll say, “Hey, Sarah, can I take this kid out on a date? They’re really going through a hard time right now.”
Then Sarah takes on getting the dishes done, getting the other kids ready for bed, their teeth brushed, all of that, to allow me to go out with the one kid and really focus on them and repair the relationship.
Mercy and forgiveness are necessary to the family as a school of community, where we learn how to live and how to love, how to have patience, how to have charity, how to be humble.
Because the family has broken down so much in our society, these virtues aren’t being learned at home. If you never learned at home as a little kid not to snap at somebody because they ruined something of yours, how can you, all of a sudden, magically, not snap at somebody in the office because they did something you didn’t like? You have to learn this in the home.
When we first got married, some friends gave us advice that we took to heart: whatever you do, do it together, even if it is inconvenient or inefficient, because the world is going to try to tear you apart.
We try to keep the family together and our own relationship strong. One thing that we do is to both go to bed every night at the same time and get up together. While we’re brushing our teeth at night, or getting ready for bed, it gives us those moments for the little interactions that have become so much the bedrock of our relationship.
Those small things, over time, have really built us up. “Hey, what do you think about this?” Or “I heard this,” or “A kid said this.” Sarah brings me into the homeschooling she does during the day. The little moments in our everyday experiences are really the bedrock for building community.
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Sarah: Our family dinner is something we protect. We really want the kids to be used to the fact that the dinner table is where we are all together. Even if it’s not that great, even if the little ones are screaming the whole time, and there seems to be more chaos than peace, it is important for us just to sit there and know that we are a family and we are together.
This is what God made us to be. We really fight for that. Community doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We’re working together, we’re sowing the harvest together. We have this shared mission.
