ONE OF THE HARDEST THINGS ABOUT MY SISTER’S DYING was that Heidi could barely speak for more than a month. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, but the muscles of her throat and voice box no longer responded to signals scrambled by brain tumors. For decades, we’d talked several times a week by phone over the two thousand miles between our homes. Our friendship had been one of listening and deep soul sharing.

Yet there was Mercy woven through my heartache at the loss of our spoken communication.

Before I made my last trip to be with Heidi, I had wondered in prayer and with trusted friends how to connect with her when she wasn’t her connecting-self anymore. The Spirit reminded me how we shared a love of books, and so I read to her often. A sweet moment came after a chapter on anxiety and faith-filled “contagious calm.” It summed up my best hopes for my final days with her, and my heart was full. Some quiet tears were dripping down my cheeks. I glanced over to find Heidi staring at me with eyes wide and fully present. It was a blast of Radiant Love!

Touch the Hurting World with Love

Since the spring, I’ve been reflecting and praying about and for Divine Mercy. It’s been vivid to me through songs(1), readings, scripture, and personal experiences. Mercy was my heart’s deepest longing for Heidi, me, and the family in her last five months. It was the only thing I could trust with my overwhelming grief. No other reality (and certainly not my own capacity) was sturdy enough.

One night in August when it was quiet in Heidi’s house, I sat next to her rocking chair knitting and humming hymns while she napped. She woke up once with a big smile to “It Is Well With My Soul.” My role of loving accompaniment was affirmed without words. My sorrow was real, but not the whole story. I experienced the flow of God’s mercy like a current sweeping us along.

Contemporary Christian author, teacher, and mystic, James Finley writes, “…God is love, and when love touches suffering, the suffering turns love into mercy. [Christ] is like a field of boundless mercy…”(2).

I’ve thought a lot about receiving mercy, about Heidi and the family receiving mercy. I also imagined Divine mercy flowing outward through me, and through the people who cared for her, especially her husband and daughter-in-law. I saw how we pass mercy along to the places where we touch the hurting world with love.

More Knitting Mercies

Another morning later that long month, I sat next to Heidi at a window overlooking her bird feeder. I was knitting and she was moving her food around a bit, slowly picking at morsels and trying to get them to her mouth. At one point, I realized she was looking intently at my knitting and at the sheet of paper where I referred to a simple hat pattern. Then she pointed to the knitting. I showed it to her, held it out to her hands and she felt the yarn and traced the raised criss-cross pattern with her fingers.

I started talking about it, as if she’d asked me. She touched the stitch markers spaced along the knitting needles, and I explained what they did for me. Her finger gestured to the pattern chart and my sticky note underlining the row I was working on. I explained that. The scene lasted at least 15 minutes.

While I’d been knitting that week, I’d doubted I’d ever want to see or wear this hat again: Would it be a symbol of this hard time, a reminder of my anguish and these days of Heidi’s dying? If so, I thought, that was a shame because the yarn was beautiful Shetland wool that my sister-in-law brought back for me from Scotland. So I’d tried to wonder instead how to make the hat a tangible reminder of something more hopeful.

That one casual interaction with Heidi blessed my hat thoroughly! I’ll remember her touch on the raised pattern, her curiosity, and her reaching out from the seeming fog of her condition into that moment. She sought connection, and the hat is now a symbol of that connection. It was really an answer to a prayer I didn’t know how to shape. Even my saddest misgivings about knitting while Heidi was dying were wrapped up in Mercy.

What if God’s Name is Mercy?

Pope Francis claims that God’s name is Mercy, so I’m going with it. I’m appreciating  the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that overflow with Divine Mercy. I’m learning what it means on an experiential level.

To close, I offer a surprising image of Mercy from Cynthia Bourgeault(3):

The story comes to mind of the little fish swimming up to its mother, all in a panic: “Mama, Mama, what’s water? I gotta find water or I’ll die!” We live immersed in this water, and the reason we miss it is not that it is so far away but, paradoxically, so close: more intimate to us than our being itself.… [Mercy] is the water in which we swim. Mercy is the length and breadth and height and depth of what we know of God—and the light by which we know it.…

The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional—always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we, too—in the words of Psalm 103—“swim in mercy as in an endless sea”(4). Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Everywhere, always with us, always for us…it’s endless Mercy “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28). I want to live in that intimate holy Reality. I want to receive Mercy fully, give thanks, and allow God’s merciful love to flow through me to others. The implications are profound—for our suffering, our losses, our hatreds and fears, how we respond to people different from us, to conflicts large and small, and to wider social upheavals. Like the passerby in Luke’s gospel, who treated a half-dead “enemy” with compassion, we are asked to be the neighbor “who showed mercy.” (Luke 10:25-37).

• How might you receive Mercy and allow it to flow through you today?

Resources:
(1) A contemporary song by The Porter’s Gate has played in my head on repeat for months. Hear “Have Mercy on Us” (2017) on YouTube.
(2) https://cac.org/daily-meditations/mercy-ever-present/
(3) Cynthia Bourgeault (2001). Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, p 20, 25.
(4) Bauman, L. C. (2000). Ancient songs sung anew: The psalms as poetry. Telephone, TX: PRAXIS.  “For as the Heavens reach infinitely beyond earth and time, we swim in Mercy as in an endless Sea.” (Psalm 103:11)
(5) Banner image credit: Flickr, Underwater Light (Indonesia) by Enrico Strocchi

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