The Single, Most Important Thing

It's mercy. Always and forever, mercy.

Happy Friday, everyone! How are things going in your world?

Here, this week, love and death have been intertwined. My mom came for a visit just days after my partner’s mom died, so in the midst of everything else, I’ve been getting my ducks in a row to drive down for her burial. The gathering will be my first experience with a green burial, which speaks to Carole’s lifelong integrity and also the greater topic of integrity and death. So, expect a report-back on that in the near future.

My mom visiting consumed the majority of my attention, though. My mom’s and my relationship is deep, complicated, and intense. We’re, neither of us, light and breezy people. Add in a complex family history and every visit seems to involve heavy conversations about betrayal, trauma, addiction, and forgiveness interspersed with laughter-filled discussions of books, kids, friends, and jobs.

In one conversation we ended up reminiscing about family trips to coastal Maine when I was a kid, which were an absolute high point of my entire, complicated childhood. I remembered an old black-and-white photograph from those days that I was sure I had somewhere, but I couldn’t find it for the longest time. Did I have it online somewhere? In an album? Shoved in a drawer?

Found it! L-R: Bob & Betty Press (old friends of the family), Eggbert & Dorothy Walker (our hosts), my mom, my brother David, and me, circa 1976. I am four years old. Yes, my brother is holding an axe, because THAT was a good idea.

In the course of my search, I came across a piece I wrote about mercy the last time my mom visited— two years ago when my son was graduating from high school. I didn’t share it here then because, honestly, my mom reads this newsletter and I wasn’t ready to be that naked with her. After this visit, though, I think it’s okay. Also, it belongs here because if there is a single, most important thing I can ever say about how to practice integrity it is this: develop a capacity for mercy— for yourself and everyone else. It’s the only way to keep going in the face of all the inevitable imperfections and heartbreaks of life in relationships with other people.

What is mercy, though? Especially for those of us who aren’t religious, it can feel like something that isn’t for us. Mercy lives in the realm of believers. And it’s true, seeking mercy, and praying for it, can be part of a spiritual life. But mercy is for everybody, no god required.

Years ago I heard one of my favorite authors, Dorothy Allison, speak about her latest book. She meditated with us on forgiveness— specifically for her father, who sexually abused her as a child. So, to my mind, someone that she never ever has to forgive because what he did is the definition of unforgivable.

Her response to the question of whether or not she had forgiven her father, though, struck a chord deep in my heart, and the reverberations have lingered for decades. She offered this hard-won wisdom:

Forgiveness is a journey, not a destination. I have to make the decision to walk that path every day.

Despite my attraction to Allison’s words, however, I’ll admit I've never had much interest in forgiveness. Raised on the turn-the-other-cheek variety of Christian forgiveness, I felt like it was being weaponized in order to force me to accept the unacceptable over and over again. That was not, and still is not, a thing I can do.

But in recent years I've been feeling into the notion of mercy, which is a related, but different, proposition. Mercy is based on the acknowledgment by everyone, first and foremost, that harm has been caused. Following that collective acceptance of reality, someone (a judge, for instance) has the power to offer a reduction in punishment for causing that harm— in recognition of time served, work done, or other aspects of the perpetrator’s behavior. In other words, the person deciding the punishment is empowered to consider the whole person, not simply the harm they’ve caused.

In a religious or spiritual context, we appeal to the Divine for mercy because similarly, God(dess) has the power to see the entirety of us— our transgressions and our Light. The Light is who we ARE. The transgressions are what we do. God(dess) always holds that truth for us.

We can also approach perpetrators in our own lives in this way. Instead of offering forgiveness from a sense of lack, ie- you took my power from me and by forgiving you I'm taking it back, we offer mercy from a position of power.

This is an important distinction for me. No one, no matter how hard they have tried, has been able to take my Light. Nor can they remove from my tally my many failings and transgressions. Combined, they make up the wholeness of me; they give me weight and power.

From that place of power within myself— where I know who I am and understand the harm I have caused in a wider context— I can offer mercy to the people who have hurt or violated me. Holding myself holistically I can then extend that same expansiveness to others.

That is all easy to say, however. The actual work of offering mercy is a much harder, messier learning process. Case in point, my relationship with my mother.

At 51 years old, despite all my mother’s mistakes and betrayals from the time I was a kid until just the last handful of years, I can say unreservedly that she's one of my favorite people. She's smart, funny, loving, thoughtful, and committed to making the world a better place. Through twenty years of conflict, of pulling away and coming back together again, she has learned to listen and let me be who I am. She respects my choices even when she disagrees with them. She also honors my boundaries, because she doesn't really have a choice if she wants us to be close, which she does. As a result, she has done way more internal work than I think she would have ever chosen to or been able to conceive of on her own. That effort, not whether or not it always produces my ideal result, matters.

To extend mercy to her means seeing her wholeness— always remembering that she is a person aside from her position as my mom, who is on her own journey that I will never fully understand. She is also human, just like I am, which means she doesn't know what the hell she's doing a lot of the time. She certainly didn't know what she was doing when she became a parent, and she wasn't raised in a culture that valued therapy, or unpacking your trauma so it didn't inadvertently control your choices. Most of the things she’s done which were damaging to me weren't even about me. Really, none of her choices are about me. They're about her, and who she's working on becoming in her life. I don't have to clutch her transgressions so tightly, as if they will disappear if I don’t keep an eye on them. As if they are the most important thing about her. I can just love her for who she is because I understand that she isn't about me.

Apologies without change, without the work of atonement, are empty. My mom is, in her own way, working very hard to atone. So, if mercy is a spiritual skill that I am developing, my mom is an easier place to start. As opposed to other folks in my life who have never apologized for the harm they caused or expressed a single regret, much less offered atonement.

Mercy also doesn't always have to look the same every time it’s offered. Mercy offered to my mom can look different than mercy offered to my dead brother David who abused me, or to my ex-husband, who continues to cause me harm when he can, even after over a decade apart. Mercy can look like remembering that very few people enact harm for the fun of it; they’re simply acting out their own pain. Maintaining clear boundaries that name their impact and reduce their chance to further inflict their pain on me while still wishing for them to no longer be in pain is mercy. Believing they are their Light and not their transgressions, without ignoring their continued capacity and determination to transgress is mercy.

I used to imagine that the work to extend mercy to people who hurt me would, at some point, lead to the extension of mercy for me in return. There are so rarely pure victims in this world, and I, for one, have never been one. It’s taken me a long time to accept that this sort of reciprocal mercy is not always possible. But that doesn’t change my obligation to do the work to offer mercy because I will surely need it from someone else someday. My children probably most of all.

Mercy makes my integrity practice itself honest. It roots it in compassion and not in some desperate striving to be good. Mercy saves me from my own righteousness and makes me a better daughter, a better lover, a better mother, a better co-worker, a better neighbor, and a better friend.

If integrity is the what of my life, mercy is the how. Mercy, always and forever, mercy.

How do you understand and offer mercy?