On Mercy
This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on forgiveness.
If there’s anything I could think of as merciful, it’s the fact that the spirit meets us wherever we are, in whatever shape we’re in, and matches enough of that hot mess for us to understand. Mind you, easy does not enter this equation anywhere—we do not easily understand them, and sometimes it takes a decade or so for us to get it, when the circumstances are just right, but they do that sort of thing for us on the regular.
If I was looking for something as proof of love and didn’t know better, that would be more than enough proof. We’re obtuse bastards.
Mercy as a mechanism for what the Christians call grace, however, I don’t think exists. God doesn’t need to “cover us up” with blood sacrifice to look at us, in part again because we cannot offend divine love, which is just as much with me and a reader as it is with the rapist, murderer, and genocidal maniac of your choice. God is as much in the mechanisms of war and true poverty, which grind what we think of as decency to dust, as god is in the hundreds of year old religious buildings.
God’s ministers in the spirit speak to anyone who can hear in any of these places and do things for people who are deaf, paired for the whole of your life with you, closer than a spouse.
God sees everything, and all jokes about celestial peeping Toms aside, god does not love you any less nor does god need to have anyone tortured to death to see you. That particular conception is what happens when someone tries to enumerate the mysterious according to their understanding, or as Papa might say it, the religions of the book understand the divine through the distortion of the mind, which is not at all equipped to do that.
The mind needs people to suffer, and does not care if it’s you or someone whose suffering you can savor in your imagination.
Oh hell. I can feel a post on justice coming on.
If you like (and are coming out of a Christian background): god sees it all and does not “care” in the sense that the divine doesn’t need to punish you for anything. Nothing you can do rises to that level of offense, which is literally something you’re imagining can exist. The only person who condemns you is you (and other people.) The spirit might tell you to knock something off, but that’s really about you and your understanding or well being—and it does that for all of us. You’re just as much a part of the divine as the person next to you.
There is no need for mercy. You already have whatever you might think you need there, in the form of divine love, and it does NOT involve wallowing in misery or torturing anyone.
The divine is not, dear hearts, mad at you. You might be mad at you, but the divine?
God loves you. You don’t need to do anything to earn it. You were born into that love, you will die in that love, and over lives you will learn to come home.
