Mirror of Mercy

I was talking with a client last week about the concept of “mercy” and how she sees a lack of it in our current national culture. She asked me how I defined mercy and her question has kept me thinking all weekend. 

I told her that my working definition of mercy as of today (my thoughts on things continue to evolve as I learn more and have more lived experiences), is a compassionate understanding of another person’s suffering and knowing their difficult behaviors stem from their inner pain. Mercy calls out of us a radical tenderness when we can see the human soul in another and choose love, forgiveness, and compassion instead of condemnation. We can still hold people accountable and seek justice, but it stems from a place of love rather than hate and disgust. 

Mercy is hard for us humans. 

We don’t like to be wronged, we want justice to be served, and it is easy to feel superior or self-righteous within our human egos. 

I’m working on being more merciful, but I still have a lot of work to do. Especially toward people who hurt my children or other people’s children. But, I want to share a tool that has helped me the most when it comes to making progress on showing mercy to others. 

I call it the Mirror of Mercy. This helps me remember that the other person is reflecting to me something about my own self and before I judge them harshly, I need to reflect on times I have acted in the same hurtful manner to someone else. 

Here is the phrase I use, but I encourage you to find your own words to make this practice personal for you:

She/He/They are ____________, and sometimes I am too. 

The blank might be filled in with: awful, mean, gossipy, lying, greedy, power-hungry, egotistical, cruel, competitive, inappropriate, rude, cold, unfair, impossible, grouchy, unreasonable, irrational, jealous, conniving, disappointing, harmful, disloyal, insulting, shaming, critical, manipulative, cheating, controlling, neglectful, excluding, abusive, intimidating, avoidant, failing, stereotyping, judgey, withholding, resistant, and the list goes on with ways we can be difficult or harm one another.  

Next time you find yourself blaming or labeling what someone else is doing wrong, pause and add an inner whisper, “and sometimes I do that too.” This offers us a quick reset toward shifting our brains into compassion and mercy. 

Mercy is about seeing our shared humanity underneath another person’s behaviors and our own. It isn’t about shaming others or ourselves, it is about seeing through a lens of compassion and then applying a conscious intention to do better next time. 

We all struggle with being human, the things in that list above that we blame others for are slippery slopes for judging their behaviors and not seeing our own selves in the mirror. When we can accept that we too miss-step sometimes, it helps us act more compassionately toward ourselves and others. Taking responsibility for our behaviors and intending to do-better-next-time increases our levels of self-esteem and self-trust. And if you are showing yourself more compassion, you can’t help but show others more compassion too. 

Mercy is seeing the compassionate loving potential inside all humans, even those we find the most difficult of humans.

I’ve been studying the teachings of Thomas Merton this month to provide an introduction to his work on Thursday morning. In my research, I found this quote of his which can apply to mercy: 

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves.”

 We all mess up. We are all perfectly messy selves. To show each other mercy is to rank love above the mess. 

We still have to clean up our own messes, but being loved and shown mercy gives us more motivation to take responsibility for those messes. For others, you can show mercy to those you love while also holding them accountable to clean up their messes. If the behaviors don’t improve, then you get to take your merciful heart somewhere else. 

The challenge with most of my writings is that you are the only ones reading them - the loving, kind, compassionate, smart, grace-giving, merciful humans on the planet - the people who could really benefit from these tools aren’t the ones willing to read an email like this. So we press on, you Loving Ones, we continue our striving to be the most loving people we can be and we trust that this creates a ripple effect until those who refuse to self-reflect are forced to. Love will win, it always does. 

The Mirror of Mercy isn’t passive or walk-all-over-me material, it is a tool to help provide you with a powerful presence and awareness that allows you to be the stronger person and lead with love. 

Sending love to your merciful heart, 

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