Signposts On The Way

Lord have mercy! Sunday’s readings extolled the wonder of God’s mercy. Who would have thought that mercy would be a controversial matter? Isn’t it something we all need, being the humans that we are? Yet, when the Holy Father foregrounds mercy as a quality of God we can rely on—God being God—Pope Francis has many detractors. It may be rooted in a misunderstanding of what salvation means.

It cannot mean somehow we have achieved perfection. Even the saintliest among us are not that. Just ask anyone who lives with them. Perhaps they are the least judgmental person you’ve ever known, but they can also be dangerously naïve about the motivations of others. Sometimes the very quality that is noted as saintly by others is a source of great irritation for those who have to live with it. But we don’t need to look at the exemplary members of the Body of Christ when a glance in a mirror will remind us that this member of the Body of Christ, made so by virtue of baptism rather than my own virtues, has a ways to go to reach anything resembling perfection in the life that Christ made possible for us.

So, what is God’s mercy, and what does it mean for us? Perhaps a good way to understand mercy is something my leadership coach is always encouraging me to do: reframing. Maybe it’s an invitation from God to reframe our relationship away from a transactional one that draws lines and counts infractions in a game we are always losing (if we’re honest), to a relational one where what matters is our desires, the motivations that underlie our way of understanding and responding to God’s many invitations to live according to God’s Reign, to live as Christ lived. God’s mercy may be about the direction of our lives and not directions for living, a reframing away from the 10 commandments to the two greatest commandments summed up in one word: Love. God’s mercy, something about which reams of paper and gallons of ink have been spent describing, may be about freeing us up to orient our lives more toward love, receiving it and, by that means, becoming better at giving it.