The Manliness of Mercy

The Manliness of Mercy: A Reflection on Male Spirituality

When my son was about three years of age he and I witnessed a couple dogs fighting near the Halifax Common. I remember him asking me to “Make them stop, Daddy!” My thoughts were focused on protecting my son as the dog owners yelled and tried to regain control of their pets. My son’s thoughts, however, were focused on his father seemingly being capable of fixing this scary situation.

Of course he would reach out to me to “make it stop” because, like most parents in most situations, we have a good track record in our child’s limited experience of carrying out our role as protector and “make it go away” guru. We brush dust off small scrapes and administer the loving medicine of a kiss and an “all better.” We make problems go away. That’s what we do; it’s a function that comes with the territory but it does not last and, really, never truly existed anyway. The only truth active in these early days of parenting is the truth of self-giving love; everything else is a deception of control which will be unveiled by the child through the healthy blossoming of maturity.

I will suggest in this brief reflection that control participates in the language of slavery not freedom. The tentacles of control run deep in our lives in a myriad of ways.  

Can we pause for a minute and admit that we really like control? A Christian worldview would suggest that this is the epicentre of the question to be asked as we grow. It is arguable that the entire fall of humanity was based on the human’s desire to wrestle control from God who is entirely invested in our freedom but we wanted control of our own destiny. Our control did not gain us freedom but a slavery disguised as we-know-best. The human race has proven a tremendous ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because we want control.

Control sets us on an addictive path of manipulating our surroundings, relationships, experiences and feelings to such a self-destructive, delusional level that we actually believe that we have earned freedom. Grace unmasks this self-deception and deprives it of power. This free gift reveals the seat of our slavery, our control and our desperate attempts to protect ourselves from shame, hurt and pain.

Life is gift. It is all gift. That we earned nothing is as fundamental to the Christian understanding of reality as it gets. Grace is radical. It is total embrace, reconciliation, satisfaction for the sins of the whole inherited legacy of humanity that stemmed from our going it alone trying to control our own destiny. Grace reveals God’s immeasurable, unmerited, unearned, free gift - totally free, ridiculously free, abundantly free - which restores the beauty of the Garden that we may know now, dimly as it may be, as we draw closer and closer to its clarity in the intimacy of our walking out our journey as we deepen in relationship and trust with Jesus Christ. It restores our capacity to know beauty, hope, faith, embrace and mercy as breadcrumbs back to the heart of freedom as love. Grace restored our freedom; grace is restoring our freedom and grace will restore our freedom. Grace was in places and events we know and those we can only fathom and, yes, even those places that are outside of our entire understanding. Even the darkness is not darkness to you, O Lord.

It’s all gift. Freely given to us by God.

I met a woman a short time ago who having raised a family was now going through a valley she had never experienced before and it was a terrifyingly scary place for her. The depths of this painful walk were hard to hear being poured out. She showed me a picture of her bruises. One bruise had the distinct image of the cross at its centre. It was a striking whiteish cross in the midst of a black and blue bruise. For this woman the cross symbolized hope. Hope amid the bruises. Such hope amid acute pain in life should not surprise us because we know God never abandons us. God is present in the depths of our brokenness, hurt, shame, pain, sin and whatever mess we find ourselves in, whether the consequences of our own bad decisions or not. The simplest truth I can speak to someone else is that God will not abandon them – ever – even if sometimes it feels like it.

My powerlessness to “Make it stop!” for my son is an early admission for me of things I can and can’t control. I am grateful that my inability to make it stop was in the presence of dogs fighting one another in a pleasant park area of Halifax rather than the father in any number of warzones in our world who cannot make the war stop, or the father who cannot make the dying of their sick child stop.

“I can’t stop it, my son” was my feeble response to my young son. There are many things that I can’t explain adequately that he will come to know as he grows into a man, but the one that grounds it all is the very essence of our faith, the paschal mystery as rescue, restoration, comfort, renewal, peace, hope, love and freedom. God has been merciful to me; please, Lord, help me walk in this gift of mercy and share it with others.

May we learn to redefine victory because we have been lured into a sense of success that we must control in order to maintain. It is a lie, possibly the first and great lie. Changing direction is sometimes a painful walk through a desert but we have God in our midst; God who never abandons us and is full of mercy. The contemporary band, “Mumford and Sons” put it this way in their song, Roll Away Your Stone “It not the long walk home that will change my heart but the welcome I receive with every start.”

As we let go of control may we be merciful to ourselves, because the still voice of God is merciful to us. May this gift of mercy give us humble confidence to be merciful to others.

I believe the seat of manliness is found not in control but in receiving mercy as free gift to be re-offered to others. The machismo of control pales in comparison to manliness of mercy.