Mercy Me!

Nothing like a family funeral to sow salt powder into the clouds.

Everyone does their duty--puts on their funeral clothes and somber faces, fills their pockets with clichés: 
"I am sorry for your loss,” or “They’re in a better place.”

Duties are done, flowers are ordered, donations are made but old hurts are awakened and they simmer as they keep the phone lines open: “Do you remember when…”

As I near the peak of life expectancy, I can’t believe this is still going on--even in me and my own extended family.  It seems to me that, by now, we are all older and should have some life experience and perspective. We’ve all been through stuff.  Hard stuff.  When we hope for understanding and acceptance, why is it so hard to give?  Looking back, maybe that aunt wasn’t rude; maybe she was just painfully shy to the point of avoidance. Maybe an aunt literally shopped ‘til she dropped to keep memories of a savage beating in a public square at bay. Maybe the cousin who couldn’t hold a job wasn’t just a loser.  Maybe he was a kid overwhelmed on the inside by a frantic level of anxiety and ADHD as he tried to negotiate life in a family so busy that they invented the word frenzied. Maybe the jovial aunt WAS funny, but she was also cruel and hot-tempered at times--and maybe a bit too often.   Maybe the uncle with the bad temper wasn’t mad at the world.  Maybe he was stuck in a grief that had overwhelmed him since childhood.  Maybe a cousin wasn’t just an addict, maybe he drank to medicate horrific memories of losses that time would not heal.

On earth, we are all flawed humans.  Maybe we invented the idea of heaven because we all desire to be better, perfect even, and we know we just can’t do it on our own.  The promise of the after-life is that we will be made perfect, but what is this perfection that gives us hope?  Do we expect all of the manufacturing flaws that burdened us on earth to be erased?  I wonder about that version of heaven and of God.

Maybe heaven is heavenly because we surrender our defenses at the gate. Once inside, we won’t need them anymore because, just maybe, in heaven, the streets are not lined with gold, but our hearts are lined with mercy, mercy for ourselves and for each other. 

When I was a freshman in high school, I had to memorize “The Quality of Mercy” from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.  The words come back to me now:

                                                     The quality of mercy is not strained;
                                                     It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
                                                     Upon the place beneath.  It is twice blest;
                                                     It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
                                                     Tis the mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
                                                     the throned monarch better than his crown…
                                                     It is an attribute to God himself.
 
At this personal moment and in these stormy times, we could us a gentle rain…Lord, have mercy.