I remember the experience vividly. Sometime in my mid-to-late twenties, I was awoken suddenly in the middle of the night. I wasn’t particularly worried or stressed out at the time. I had recently become a bit more serious about my prayer life. My knowledge of Scripture had improved through singing in the choir and attending church regularly. That night, I sat bolt upright in my bed. Fully awake, I heard the words, “I have cleansed your heart and given you a new Spirit.”
I can’t tell you whether it was an audible voice or just inside my head. I mainly remember being perplexed. It was not an experience I had sought or would have expected. It’s never happened again. Despite the unbidden nature of the experience, there was a lightness that accompanied it — “for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30).
These many years later, I recognize the message I heard as a paraphrase of Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” What remains extraordinary about that middle of the night awakening was that it was an answer to a prayer I didn’t even know I had been praying.
What I experienced was not transactional. It was a pure, unearned gift. I wish I’d had an older soul in the next room, the way Samuel had Eli in the Hebrew Scriptures, to tell me to recognize that it was the Lord who was calling me. Despite my confusion, I knew something was different, and it has remained so.
At that stage in my prayer life, I thought it was my job to remove a series of impediments between myself and God. St. Teresa of Avila likens prayer to the way we receive water in the gardens of our soul. In the earliest stages, we laboriously pull each bucket of water from a well to tend that garden. As we progress, we increasingly let God do the work of growing our souls. As any gardener can attest, there is the hard, disciplined spade-work of preparation, but then you must let go and see what blooms.
I had imagined that to get closer to God, I needed to pray more, to increase the sheer number of minutes and their quality. It was a puzzle to solve rather than a relationship to be developed. Over his doorway, the psychologist Carl Jung famously had a carving in Latin that read: “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.” I suspect that, given its expansive nature, mercy is one of the most transformational ways we encounter God.
I was also at a stage in my journey in which I was more focused on penance and fear of judgement than God’s mercy. I was consumed with my imperfections. Years later, my wise spiritual director gently pointed out that thinking I’m beyond God’s redemption, or that I was providing a particularly hard case for the Almighty, was a subtle and pernicious form of pride. True humility grounds us. We are neither too low nor too high. When we are too focused on being worthy, we can become like small children jumping up and down and waving our arms to be seen. I thought all conversations with God began with me. But it is very hard to receive the mercy of God when we are so self-conscious.
Nery Gabriel Lemus, A Prayer for MacArthur Park, 2022. White tread on Guatemalan textile, 21 ½ x 30 in. Collection of Jarl Mohn.
That encounter in the night shifted the paradigm. If I was willing to believe that God was willing to cross any distance to be in relationship with me, what might change? I realized not only was God willing, but God also deeply desired to be in relationship with me as His beloved child. God wasn’t showing up as the school principal to punish me for stepping out of line but was clearing the decks to invite me into a new place of freedom. It also opened me to the possibility that God was much nearer than I had imagined — radically present in each moment of my life.
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I had experienced God’s mercy. Mercy is unbidden, unearned, and uninitiated. It creates a space for our growth in love. In fact, if you look up “mercy” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, the entry is: see Love. God’s very nature is love, and it calls us to places of greater freedom and growth. We cannot truly love when we are afraid. Mercy has an amazing capacity to let us experience unconditional love and move away from fear and anxiety.
In my life and in the lives of those I walk with, it is striking how often shame and fear prevent spiritual growth. Acceptance and mercy are much more likely to allow us to grow in love. Often the only way we can emerge from a purely transactional way of interacting with God and our fellow travelers is to experience mercy firsthand. One does not have to have an experience like mine to know the feeling of lightness that comes when a burden lifts.
I entered seminary with two young children. There was one week that I had both a sick child and a huge Old Testament exam. My professor had a reputation for being tough, and I had brought to graduate school an intense desire to always do my very best. I never asked for extensions, and felt I had a lot to prove as a second-career student with small children.
For whatever reason, that week simply proved too much for me. I had stayed up all night studying and knew I was in no shape to take that test. I called the professor the morning of the exam and told him I wouldn’t be able to be there. I hoped he’d give me a chance to make up the exam later in the week, but I was prepared to accept a zero since the syllabus clearly stated that make up exams were not offered. I held my breath and waited for his response. He said, “Why don’t you just skip the exam? We can average your other grades at the end of the semester.”
What? It took me awhile to fully accept that I wasn’t only being given a reprieve, but a full release. Unbidden. Unearned. Not initiated by me, save the willingness to make the phone call and admit my limits.
Mercy, of course, has implications beyond a release from the bondage of self-imposed high expectations or internalized individualism. It is an invitation to live into a wholly new way of life. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes powerfully about the journey of freedom that the Israelites experience in the Exodus. They begin with the first freedom, which is the physical release from Egypt. The wandering in the desert is what allows for a different level of that freedom and prepares them to live in a new way. The gift of the law is a community rule of life that allows us to preserve that freedom we’ve been given.
Mercy at its highest form is receiving grace and release when there has been a real wrong done. It is unconditional love offered when penalty is expected and appropriate.
There are many atonement theories of what Christ has accomplished on the cross. The one that has always most deeply resonated for me is that Jesus is willing to embody a radical self-giving act of love on behalf of all of humanity. It is an extravagant gift of love that we cannot match, cannot initiate, and cannot ever fully comprehend. When we know ourselves to be recipients of that love, we are free to offer it to others.
Of course, we fall short and behave in ways that we genuinely regret. Most of us don’t enjoy those moments of awareness in ourselves. Growing in spiritual maturity means increasing our willingness to admit fault and be vulnerable with those we have harmed. We need to accept the consequences of our actions.
To experience mercy from God or other people in these circumstances is particularly precious, and I suspect those who grant it most easily already know themselves to have received it at other times. A friend of mine once said, “You know you’ve met a person of real spiritual depth when you tell them the worst things about yourself, and they are not surprised.” What my friend meant was that it’s not because that person assumes the worst in you; it’s because they know the darkness in themselves. When we know our own darkness, we accept the darkness of others. Our capacity to offer mercy expands in direct proportion to our awareness of our own need for it.
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What are the barriers to receiving and offering mercy? Often mercy is so surprising, so outside the bounds of what seems appropriate or fair that we are initially tempted to reject it. Cultural notions of fairness often impede our ability to apprehend the gratuitous grace that comes to us in these moments. Mercy’s unearned nature can be one of the biggest impediments to our accepting it.
When my son was in middle school, he engaged in some behavior that harmed a good friend of his. The mother of the child called me, not with accusation, but concern. She believed this behavior didn’t reflect my son’s character. She could have easily called the school and proceeded with disciplinary procedures that could have changed his entire school experience. Instead, she recognized that he was under the influence of some peers. She hoped that by calling me directly, we could intervene together. This not only extended mercy to my son and our family, but it also preserved a deeply important relationship between our two children, who to this day are still close.
Initially I was so shocked I hardly knew how to react. I was embarrassed and angry that my son had behaved the way he had. When I spoke to him — at my first question — he began to cry. It became evident that he was so relieved to have been found out, despite the shame he felt. He had been carrying a heavy burden that I hadn’t even seen. Mercy was the gateway to recovering himself, and it allowed him to share the burdens he had been carrying in isolation. Also, our relationship was transformed.
Personally, I had to wrestle with the opportunity to reconcile and repair my own friendship, an opportunity that I did not deserve. I felt guilty that I had been so unaware. I was embarrassed that my child had behaved in such a way. Her own child had been hurt and harmed, and yet we were being offered kindness. Later the next year, when I sat in her son’s bar mitzvah ceremony, I was filled with gratitude that we had even been invited.
Giving and receiving mercy is a fluid process. We vary in our ability to receive and extend it. All true gifts of the Spirit are not just for our own edification. They build up the Body of Christ, or they are not genuine fruits of the Spirit. Boundaries of love and mercy are expanded, and abundant life has space to grow. One cannot have fully metabolized the gift of mercy if one cannot also offer it to others.
Ultimately, mercy is a characteristic of God’s love that we as Christians practice. Through the gift of the incarnation, we open ourselves to the mystery of mercy. The practice of mercy can begin in small ways. When we are cut off in traffic, we can be curious about what might have caused the person to behave in that way, and we can offer a prayer for them, rather than slamming on the horn. When someone we care about hurts us, we can explore whether this is an occasion to offer mercy. This is not a call to step away from appropriate boundaries or to avoid genuine issues of justice. It presupposes that the offering of mercy is an opportunity to expand love and transformation. It creates a possibility for reconciliation.
The reality is that God’s mercy, when received, changes our capacity to love. It is transformative because of its very nature. It is pure gift, and so it invites us to move in ways that defy calculation. It is also generative. We lose nothing by sharing it. We grow in love when we offer mercy, and we grow in love when we graciously receive it.
God’s mercy is also challenging, because we often slip back into a transactional modality when we give and receive love and mercy — as in the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus dines with tax collectors and sinners, and the good religious people of the day are taken aback. But Jesus reminds them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
