Offering: August 2024

Stealing mercy back from the gods

A spring foal, taken in 35 mm

Hi All, Just a quick note that hitting the like/heart button is a good, free & easy way to support these newsletters! Of course I appreciate you being here, either way.

If you’re looking for ways to support Palestinian people in a direct and material way, consider making a contribution to Mariam Ahmad’s fundraiser, a mother of five who is living in a tent and struggling to provide food and clean water for her children. In Mariam’s words, “with a newborn in my arms the gravity of the situation is heightened as I yearn to provide him with the nourishment and care he deserves…Please find it in your hearts to stand with us, to show mercy and compassion to a family in need.”

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

Last week I got a few rolls of film back from spring. There were photos of foals, friends, bonfires, and portraits of my truck under flowering trees. After a tough year, spring was when things started shifting. It was also when I started to think about mercy.

My recent thinking on mercy began with a quote from philosopher Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work which says “in personal life, people have absolute power over each other…There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.”

Really, it all began way before that. Growing up Catholic, I’d hear about mercy. It had something to do with sin, unworthiness, and a good God who chose to love me regardless.

Before this past spring mercy always felt sort of unfair. It seemed like something only someone who is exceedingly powerful would be able to have and to give. And it was this past spring when I started to wonder if I, a mere earthbound mortal, might steal mercy back from the Gods.

I don’t think it is allegorical to say that we are at each other’s mercy. As Judith Butler argues, we are more vulnerable than we may wish to admit as “socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.¹”

This is our material and shared situation. If we choose to be close to others and even if we do not, we’re at risk. Others risk them selves by being close to us, too.

The point that Gillian Rose is making in the passage I quoted from Love’s Work is that relationships are a bit of a lawless territory. If you feel you’ve been harmed there’s no bureau of better relating to which a report can be filed.

And I’m not saying I want a world like that. I actually quite specifically do not want a world like that. What I do want is a world in which I and others have a greater feel for the power we have to harm one another, and the shared vulnerability that’s tucked into that power. I want a world that thinks about mercy as an earthbound, human practice.

So I thought about mercy a lot in the spring, and about why it’s so hard to forget both how powerful we are and how vulnerable. I’m going to shift into first person here, because—as usual—the “universal we” feels inappropriate. I thought about mercy and why it’s so hard to forget how powerful I am, and how vulnerable. And why I so often forget about mercy.

As a kid in a Catholic family I was required to go to CCD, which I just learned today stands for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. CCD was a weekday evening and sometimes Sunday school session for Catholic kids whose parents wanted them to be “confirmed” in the church, which is the third sacrament after baptism and communion and marks a sort of initiation as an adult in the church.

In class, I remember learning about the ten commandments. The ten commandments are a set of rules like thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife and they came alongside a teaching that if we adhered to these rules, we’d be good.

In Disorientation and Moral Life, philosopher Ami Harbin describes Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of forlornness, which is “the distressing experience of realizing that God does not exist,” and that “there is no ultimate judge of right or wrong action beyond us as individuals.²”

Without rules from on high that I can follow to be reliably good, I am—in Sartre’s language—condemned to freedom; forced to make values as I go, rather than discern what’s “good” once and for all, and stick with that. This can be a tough orientational shift, and if you too grew up with prefabricated codes of conduct like the ten commandments it might be one that you resonate with, as I do.

Another reason I might have a tough time with the practice of mercy—owning my power and vulnerability in relational life—is that I grew up thinking of God as an all-powerful divine force. Everything happens for a reason is not a biblical saying but was said a lot in my home, usually with the implication that some divine order was at work and therefore being troubled by suffering was futile. As I see it, a practice of mercy is in large part about reclaiming that trouble.

I’m not Catholic anymore, but I do appreciate and rely pretty heavily on a notion of God. As a kid it was soothing for me to imagine a merciful and omnipotent force that had my best interests in mind, even if nothing else seemed to reflect that. And while my ideas have changed a lot, I’ve retained some pieces of that worldview in adulthood.

Where this belief becomes problematic is when my divine figure absorbs responsibilities that ought to be mine, or those around me, or teachers’, or leaders’, or authority figures’. If I’m more worried about whether or not I’ll get mercy from the divine than whether my earth mates will receive it from me, or vice versa, that’s a problem to me.

If I give the capacity for mercy only to God, for example, or a teacher, or the president, I relinquish the need to stay troubled about what mercy entails here on earth. I might evade the possibility of claiming and getting to know both my power and vulnerability with others. Which is a huge loss in terms of the potential toward becoming divine.

I am referencing Grace Jantzen’s book Becoming Divine here, which suggests that religious life can become something much more embodied than it has been, if we shift away from the historical emphasis on believing in the divine, and toward becoming more like that which we understand to be holy.

Theologian Catherine Keller has argued that the uncritical and historically repeated assumption that God created the world from nothing will continue to reproduce “the template of omnipotent—total—order.” The danger in putting all of one’s faith in a divine power that gets final say on what happens is that I risk losing touch with my own roles and responsibilities as a world-maker. I may forget that with a wave of my own mortal hands I have the power to make worlds, and to end them. And I’m vulnerable, because those around me have that power too.

What feels really useful to me about thinking through a practice of mercy is the way it requires an acknowledgment of power and vulnerability at once. This has definitely not always been the case, but when I’ve had the resources and wherewithal to take up the work of processing pain around harms done to me, I’ve come out on the other side with a better understanding of not only how vulnerable I am but how vulnerable others are with me too. That is, how powerful others are, and how powerful I am as well. And this is where I start to think about mercy, what it means to live at the mercy of others, and to understand that others are at my mercy, too.

It also feels important to say that practicing mercy doesn’t require occupying some mythic and detached location, like a God in the sky with a 360 view of a thing. Everyone I know has been harmed by the merciless choices of others, and is limited in real ways as a result. Everyone I know has fears, and defenses, and things that make it tough to remember the need to be careful.

I and everyone I know have had times when we are not as careful with our selves as we could be, and times when we’re not as careful with others as we should be. But there are many opportunities to practice these things, and that feels really hopeful to me.

If you’re looking for ways to support Palestinian people in a direct and material way, consider making a contribution to Mariam Ahmad’s fundraiser, a mother of five who is living in a tent and struggling to provide food and clean water for her children. In Mariam’s words, “with a newborn in my arms the gravity of the situation is heightened as I yearn to provide him with the nourishment and care he deserves…Please find it in your hearts to stand with us, to show mercy and compassion to a family in need.”

Hi All, Just a quick note that hitting the like/heart button is a good, free & easy way to support these newsletters! Of course I appreciate you being here, either way.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

Offerings is entirely reader and listener supported. If you love this work, please consider becoming a paying subscriber for as little as $5 a month or $50 a year. Paying subscribers receive weekly-ish essays in both text and audio format as well as first dibs on events including workshops and one-on-one sessions. To upgrade your subscription hit the subscribe button below.

1. From Judith Butler’s book Precarious life: The Powers of mourning and violence

2. From Ami Harbin’s Disorientation and moral life