Mercy Reflection #2

It's simply amazing what happens when you choose to focus on something and put it out there, in the universe, that said something is your focus of choice.

Mercy. I claimed it for me this year and let the universe know. And now the stuff is coming full throttle...

Yesterday I walk by someone at the gym who literally makes me physically sick. I throw him a death glare and feel great about it. Then I see someone later in the day who knows this person and i'm bragging about my death glare and how righteous it is, and she reminds me: if you knew his story, you would have mercy on him.

Mercy is in the story. The story of someone's life.

I'm a trained spiritual counselor. I KNOW THIS ALREADY. But when it comes to the people who most trigger me, I forget. This is why we *must* all, and I mean absolutely all of us no matter how enlightened we think we may be, have friends who will check our icky behaviors and call us in to greater levels of integrity and accountability.

So today I'm in the shower and it hits me, there's a difference between silence that's held for the sake of oppression and silence that's held for the sake of liberation. One is merciful and the other is all about vengance. And there are names, like a list of names immediately pops up in my head, of people that I've been holding vengeful silence with as a result of the way I am triggered by them. I realize quickly that the trigger is all about the foundational wound in my family system. I acknowledge that a lack of mercy towards others in me is all about me and my pain, and while they may be embodying stuff that's icky/awful, it's not my work to change them but to be honest about the way my pain is unmercifully targetting them.

It occurs to me: mercy for them is in listening to their stories. I break these vengeful oppressive silences by asking these folks to open up to me. And I hold liberative silence and hear them for mercy's sake.

Here's what I am going to do in 2014. I'm going to write that list down. And I'm going to pray for the willingness to arrive at mercy for the folks on my list. I'm going to ask for the willingness to invite each and every one of them to tell me their story. And then I'm going to listen if they let me. It's an experiment in mercy making and I'm going to do it.

Wish me luck (or advice/suggestions/responses/ideas, etc)...