Set to hit mailboxes in August, Issue 23 of The Mockingbird magazine is now available to pre-order.
Mercy seems soft in a hard world — that is, until you need it. When just deserts are yours to be served, the taste of mercy is unbelievably good, like the taste of freedom, relief, a fresh start. But if you haven’t experienced it for yourself, the whole thing can seem a little airy, an idealistic concept whose meaning proves elusive. What is this thing we call mercy? Essentially, it’s when an offended party could enact a judgment against their offender, and instead they choose not to. It’s the action — the inaction — of relenting.
It was only after we had begun working on this issue that we realized the real trouble with it: how offensive mercy can appear to those on the outside; how, when it seems least appropriate, it may be most urgently needed. In such instances it can seem dangerous. To let an offender ‘off the hook’ could mean giving them the freedom to once again do the very thing they’re being pardoned for. But as these pages prove, very often mercy has the opposite effect. It inspires gratitude, awe, a deeper faith in love; it inspires security and freedom to be creative. As the musician Nick Cave once wrote, “Mercy ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe — to feel protected within a society, through our mutual fallibility.” In her book Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, Anne Lamott suggests that the musculature of mercy is what holds up the skeleton of our humanity: “Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable.”
Of course, we are most likely to extend mercy to others once we have been recipients of it ourselves. This is one of the great grounding principles of the Christian faith: that God is “gracious and merciful,” or, as the classic hymn by Frederick William Faber professes, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.” In a moving photograph by Jessica Hines featured in this issue, a hand-painted road sign puts it directly: “GOD IS NOT MAD AT YOU NO MATTER WHAT!”
Jessica Hines, God is Not Mad at You No Matter What. Courtesy of the artist.
In this issue, we push that claim and find it has no limits, bringing you stories of mercy, both vertical and horizontal, major and mundane. The scholar Kendall Cox offers a close read of the Prodigal Son parable, and author Francis Spufford makes the case that the existence of everything is mercy. Dianne Collard writes of how, after a radical act of forgiveness, she worked to have her son’s killer released from prison. Katelyn Beaty writes about mercy in the internet age, especially for oneself, while Kelsey Marden sheds light on the faith motivating workers from the International Rescue Committee. Other essays teach us about the quality of mercy from Shakespeare, Moby Dick, and of course, Mr. Miyagi. We have some percipient interviews, too: with New York Times columnist Esau McCaulley; author Alex Mar, about her book Seventy Times Seven; and Robert Leon Davis, who was a cop turned fugitive of the law for more than twenty years before a powerful conversion brought him home. We hope that somewhere in these pages you feel that feeling of being off the hook. That you enjoy your just deserts, because they are sweet.
With writing from Mischa Willett, Orrey McFarland, Bill Borror, Joshua Mackin, Elizabeth Clemmer Knowlton, and Jeremiah Webster; and poems by Brian Volck, John Casteen, and Marci Rae Johnson.
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Listen to the Issue 23 playlist on Spotify
To tide you over while you wait for the issue, check out our issue-themed playlist, with tunes by Natalie Bergman, Stevie Wonder, Peter Gabriel, and Nina Simone
