What Mercy Is
Mercy, like love, takes the actions of two people to exist.
God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. - St. Thomas Aquinas
I’ve figured out it can ultimately be cruel to give my children what they want.
One of the strangest rules of parenting is that you’re very often in a situation where being a good parent to your child means pursuing a course of action that makes them passionately dislike you.
“No, you can’t have a cookie right now.”
“You have to clean your room, and you need to get it done before supper. You will not get to eat supper until it’s done.”
“I know that you really enjoy this video game, but we need to turn off the TV now. I told you 30 minutes, and the timer has gone off.”
From the gnashing of teeth and pained wailing and attempted bargaining that follows, you’d think I was running some sort of medieval torture chamber. Yet I’ve learned, often from bitter experience, that if I don’t insist on these things, if I don’t hold the line and follow through with them, our home dissolves into chaos.
If I were to let it go on long enough, I would end up with children experiencing chronic health and behavior problems, and that didn’t have basic executive functioning skills as adults. I’ve met young adults that lack those skills, and I’ve seen how they struggle to care for themselves on a basic level. I don’t want that for my children.
In other words, the most loving thing that I can do for my children is often to pursue a course of action that causes them some distress in the short term.
Similarly my husband, who works as the principal of the “alternative” campus at his district (for kids who have behavioral problems and are one or two bad choices away from being expelled and sent to juvenile detention) has to be very strict to be good at his job. In order to encourage those students to grow and improve, he has to make where he works an unpleasant place for them to be. There are strict rules about how they dress, how they wear or dye their hair, when they can go to the bathroom (at a scheduled time, with a teacher present right outside the door), and against talking in the cafeteria or in the classroom. Violation of these rules can lead to a student having to stay there for days longer than they would have to otherwise before they can return to their home campus.
Though there is distress involved, it is in the long term most merciful to hold them to a certain standard and expect them to meet it. That is the course of action that will be best for them, and that is for their good.
This is not an understanding of mercy that I often see promoted. Instead, we’re told in a thousand different ways, some subtle, some not, that mercy is ultimately about making exceptions to the rules.
“Oh, ok…even though you didn’t do task I asked you to, I’ll let you have dessert. I know it’s hard to be the only one who doesn’t get any.”
“I know this student doesn’t have a passing grade, but it would be really embarrassing for them to be left behind their peers. We’ll pass them on1.”
“I know Father Bob has had some indiscretion with women in the past, but expelling him from the priesthood would ruin his life. He was just in my office on the brink of a panic attack. We’ll just reprimand him and move him to another parish.”
Relaxing or abolishing rules ultimately isn’t mercy— you’re left with someone without resilience, with someone who risks loosing their salvation, or even with a situation that’s actively dangerous to others. Many of the children my husband works with have obviously been given minimal, if any, consistent and enforced expectations of behavior from their parents2. The end result is a child in an almost adult body who has an inability to self govern. Some of the children3 that my husband works with ultimately end up on the streets or in jail, simply because they’ve never been taught how to govern their passions and that’s where those passions lead them.
Mercy4 does not entail getting rid of the law; it requires fulfillment of it— “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it5”. Yet in that meeting of what the law6 is and how the individual follows it is where merciful action finds its right place.
As an example, there’s a diocese in Spain that recently worked with 18 co-habitating couples to remove obstacles to their getting married, and then held a ginormous group wedding. They were brought into accordance with the law rather than enabled to continue living in sin, but they were accompanied through the process of doing so. The law wasn’t changed, but was made doable.
That accompaniment into the law, into what we understand to be right and just behavior, is where mercy lies. Mercy looks like accompaniment through struggle and pain, not a taking away of it. It isn’t making an exception to the rules, it’s walking alongside someone and making the rules something that’s within their grasp to do.
When I parent my children and require them to do a task, I often break it into smaller tasks so that it’s more achievable; “Ok honey, can you put all the Barbie stuff away? Good! Now put away the blocks.” When my husband works with a child at his campus, he often pays attention to what that particular child is struggling with and mentors them one on one through the process of mastering themselves, and gives them encouragement as they take their first steps towards doing that. For example, working with a certain student to make sure he could confidentially charge his ankle monitor, or taking the time to personally converse with and encourage another student who has visibly been working on his habit of arguing with the teachers and has made progress.7
Mercy is not dissolving rules or making exceptions, but neither is is cold indifference to those suffering or struggling to uphold them.
The key word there, however, is struggle. An effort has to be made- there’s a difference between a fish that struggles against a headstream and one that floats along with it. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “God created us without us, but he did not will to save us without us.’ To receive mercy, we have to repent of our sin.” Mercy is not merely rescuing someone from the natural consequences of their actions.
There are kids that my husband ultimately isn’t able to reach. Though he genuinely wants to help them, he figured out a long time ago that you cannot force someone to accept mercy. Sometimes they choose to continue in the choices they’re making, and his job is simply to allow them to face the consequences of their actions. I know that as a parent, what my children ultimately choose will be up to them— though I do my best to give them the skills and framework they need to make good choices, whether they decide to use those tools is not something that I control.
Mercy is ultimately subject to free will, just as love is. Neither are something that remain what they actually are if they are forced. In order to act in the life of the person, mercy has to be accepted and that acceptance entails change— and even with accompaniment, it often entails a certain amount of suffering simply because change is difficult.
Mercy always stands at the ready, but it does not bend or deny truth or reality. Rather, it meets a person where he or she is in order to bring them to where they ought to be.
I know of one student in the public school system who was in sixth grade and couldn’t read even basic words because of this mentality. She wasn’t profoundly intellectually disabled; she just wasn’t held to a consistent standard. Once she was held to that standard, learning actually began to take place.
We often joke that my husband’s job description should be “remedial parenting.” There are a lot of adults out there who have never learned to govern themselves or who are impossibly permissive, and are thus unable to teach those skills to their children.
He works with kids from 6th to 12th grades.
“Mercy” defined primarily as working for someone’s real and actual good in accordance with reality as God has created it.
Matthew 5:17
“Law” here is defined as the truth of what will happen if you work against moral, societal, psychological, or physical reality.
Or talking to him privately after a relapse to figure out why— often it’s because of stress at home.
After reading your essay last night, my husband and I prayed "The Divine Mercy Chaplet". When we were finished I told my husband, "Better be careful -- we were just praying for immediate struggles!" This has me thinking about Mercy in a new way. Thanks for the read.