I have hurt other people with my actions. Other people have hurt me with their actions. Sometimes our actions are deliberately chosen to cause harm; more often, we act out of ignorance or out of our brokenness.
When we are the one who hurt someone, we want mercy. We want them to look at us and say, "I will not punish you. I will not fire you, or cut you off from this friendship, or levee this fine on you. I will not carry on this family feud." Because that is what mercy is: the act of withholding punishment.
When we are the hurt ones, we struggle to deliver mercy. Because we're hurt, damn it. Because we have been betrayed. The desire to inflict hurt, we believe, lessens our pain. We want retribution, in other words.
Punishing someone doesn't lessen our pain. Intuitively, it seems like it should. But punishment is not the same thing as seeking restitution or remediation. Restitution is restoring what was lost, whether money or trust. Remediation is fixing the problem. These things, not retribution, set the balance right.
An example of giving mercy through process is restorative justice, which seeks to connect offender and victim and allow the victim and community to truly speak their sorrow, their pain and anger.
Restorative justice is a hard concept to fathom, because it requires reconciliation rather than adjudication. It requires facing the offender and explaining the hurt, and it requires the offender listen. We don't quite trust the process. It doesn't always work. But the willingness to try it is what we call mercy.
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