love thy neighbor Archives | Mercy Me! I've Got Work to Do

I’ve never journaled much because I figured if I wrote down my most vulnerable thoughts they would eventually be used to commit me into a sanitarium where I would spend the rest of my days eating green Jell-O wondering how full life could have been if I only used my Holly Hobbie journal to draw pictures of cats instead of depictions of insanity.

But the reality is, I was never crazy. I was human. And, where the line occasionally blurs between the two, looking back at the few journals I sporadically kept over the years, the problem becomes clear. Regardless of what stage of life I was in, whether it was as a newlywed in my twenties, or as a mother of young children in my thirties, or during an existential crisis in my forties, the commonality between the pages inked in these decades was a quest to figure everything out. It wasn’t so much wisdom I sought but the clarity of a crystal ball. I wanted the yellow brick road version of life so that all I had to do was follow the path to Oz.

So often I worried about missing out or messing up. I was scared of failing and falling behind. I was certain that there were right answers and a right way, and if I was only smart enough or less directionally challenged, I would know how to do this thing called life. But what I understand now is that the unknown path isn’t something to fear. It isn’t a trap to tiptoe around. It isn’t static or straight, and it won’t save you from loneliness or loss or any of the other uncomfortable feelings of our humanity. It isn’t something to figure out as much as it is your own path to discover.

All of those questions hidden in the intermittent passages of old journals never had the answers. There was never one right way that was going to make life sensible nor one clear path that was going to keep me from making mistakes, from being hurt, or that would dull that desperate ache of our inherent yearning for Christ. If there was indeed a universal answer that one could plug in as a resolution to any question, it would be love. And, could there be anything more illogical than that? Read more →

The sin of racism has a long history of division. A history filled with a kind of hatred I have not known and I cannot understand. More than anything, a history so sinister and sly that if you aren’t paying attention you easily forget that it’s not history at all. It’s here in the present haunting and hunting and hurting others in subtle and systematic ways that perpetuate cycles of poverty, violence, and oppression.

The senseless and brutal murder of George Floyd demands understanding. Through his struggling gasps, the world heard his cry that bears the tears of countless unknown and untold instances of humankind’s history of racial hatred. It reverberated in cities throughout the world, sometimes as a growl of palpable anger and destruction – sometimes as a peaceful hum of hope and shared humanity. The clanging noise of division has been heard and the costs have been high. With it, though, is the quiet promise of hope that conversations about racism are leading to an unprecedented and long overdue conversion in our country – suffocating the sin of racism and breathing new life into love and unity with our neighbor.

Every day in countless small ways we choose what kind of change to affect in this world. Those choices matter. In the mundanity of our daily routine, we may sometimes forget how much this is so. We can’t reconcile our mistakes without first recognizing them. During the mass, we recite a prayer known as the Confiteor. “I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do…” When it comes to social injustice collectively and individually, we have failed our brothers in sisters by both what we have done and what we have failed to do.