Chased by Mercy

and Holy Week at St. Mary's

I remember the first time I took God’s name in vain. It was a fourth grade kickball game in the field at my elementary school and I was standing behind the backstop waiting for my turn to kick. There was one out and we had runners on base. My spot in the lineup was two batters away and I felt confident I could be part of kicking in the winning run. Hope faded when a pop up to the short stop was combined with a runner on second who didn’t understand the need to tag up on the base when a ball was caught in the air. Under my breath I said, “Oh, my God.”

My whole body deflated and I can still feel the unease when I recall that moment. I was shocked at myself and wondered how badly my exclamation may have hurt heart of Jesus. I thought about it all day and was disconnected from whatever I was supposed to be focused on.

I didn’t say a curse word until I was sixteen and was often playfully teased about it. Friends would look at me when a curse word from a song would come on the radio to see if I’d give in. I put my toe in the foul language world with the phrase “I’ll be damned” while hanging out with a friend.

Not cursing wasn’t really a virtue for me. It just wasn’t something that crossed my mind or seemed appealing when I was young. Things began to change a bit after the death of my dad in 2011. A generous friend of mine and I would play racquetball once or twice a week and the anger and rage of my relationship with my dad—ironically pretty tied to the confined spaces of racquetball courts—seeped out with some freestyle word choices few have replicated in the history of sports. Even then there wasn’t any temptation to take God’s name in vain. It just didn’t cross my mind.

I was blessed to receive a ten week sabbatical from the St. Mary’s community in 2019. For three of those weeks I was able to spend time in a nearly 1,000 year old monastery near the French Alps. Dr. King insisted the fruit of non-violence is the beloved community and the community I was able to be part of offered ample support for that insistence. Most of my driving through France—minus Paris—was devoid of any billboards or advertising. There was a non-invasive gentleness that permeated my time there.

Arriving home in the United States brought on a sort of whiplash. The lack of rhythm within the noise and aggression of our routines overwhelmed me. The constant demands for an other to villainize and reduce into a convenient enemy seemed larger to me than they were before the deep rest of my retreat.

All of the sudden, and seemingly out of nowhere, I found myself reacting to events I couldn’t process with exclamations of Jesus and God-dammit. I was shocked as I said those words and equally shocked by how much they felt like a prayer. As I said the name of Jesus I had the sense of a tv character in a mockumentary glancing to the camera and asking, “Are you seeing this?” Over the next two years I walked the disorienting realities of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 election, and the increased awareness of perpetual violence ingrained in our systems. I crammed 41 years of not saying Jesus and God-dammit into two years.

During a moment of contemplation one autumn morning in 2021, I sensed the Spirit gently say, “It’s time to stop taking my name in vain.” Feeling relief, I repented, “I know and I’m sorry.” But I continued, “I get it. I get it when it’s about me hitting a tennis ball into a net or not getting a green light, but what about the big stuff? What about the perpetual violence? What about the rigged systems? What about the lack of integrity in our institutions and people’s refusal to love one another?”

The questions ceased as I sensed the still small whisper, “Why don’t you ask for mercy?”

“The Good Shepherdess” by Kelly Latimore

We are going to diverge a bit from our usual Holy Week rituals this year. The pastors from St. Mary’s met Tuesday morning to contemplate what our community needs and the prevailing conviction was that space to be together in silence felt more important than the typical Holy Week movements. Reality has moved us into cursing crowds, violent demands, and an insatiable need to scapegoat. I believe we need Jesus to walk through our passion with us this week more than we need to walk with him through his.

Holy Week poignantly displays two roads—one narrow and one broad. The narrow road of life is the road of the relentless mercy of boundless love while the broad road of destruction demands a body be offered to appease a desperate crowd. Eugene Peterson translates the final verse of Psalm 23–your beauty and your love chase after me every day of my life. Mercy is chasing us—even now. I pray we will stop running and be caught into the mercy that triumphs over judgment and into the beloved community that is its fruit.

The staff of St. Mary’s is simply cultivating space for us to abide in mercy this week. As we seek the Spirit’s leading in that cultivation we are using the words of Frederick Buechner as an invitation into tenacious mercy—“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.”