Mercy.
"If it is true, like I believe in my very essence, God is in everyone and everything, let us, from the top of the world to the bottom, call out for Mercy."
In the nighttime.
Mercy.
In the darkness.
Mercy.
In the morning.
Mercy.
At my bedside.
Mercy.
On my knees now.
Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.
They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.
Lamentations 3: 22-24
Mercy. It’s heavy on my heart this month. I’m desperate for it. Not just in the Spirit realm, but here, on earth. I know about the fresh mercies, born each day, leaving me unconsumed, that the prophet Jermaiah spoke of. I feel it each morning when I repeat my daily mantra: “Sufficient it is each day therein, life is still choosing me.” I feel it when I inhale and exhale; as my toes wiggle and fingers move, new mercies each day. I feel it. I need more of it. As I look back over my time on this earth, I need just a little more mercy. Not from my Christ, who freely gave it at the Cross, but from the people who met an unhealed, broken, scared, and hurting person unable to give the mercy he's so desperate for. I find myself giving mercy a lot these days but that's solely because I'm thirsty for it.
We don’t talk enough about it. This yearning for mercy. I know I did not talk a lot about it. Even when every prayer was bookended with: “Lord, have mercy;” or “have mercy;” and, when things were too heavy to travel out of my mouth, a simple groan: “mercy.” Earlier this month I found myself in my kitchen, making breakfast, repeating: “Mercy.” I couldn’t shake it. In the shower, calling out for it; putting on my clothes talking about: I need just a little more mercy, God; getting in my carpool, answering “how you doin?” with, “needing some mercy.” Sitting in my office having to find a sermon, or ten, that would, hopefully, land something in my Spirit, to subside, or for just a moment subdue this longing. I found a few but all it did was increase my appetite, all I heard was how freely Christ gives it and how we’re commanded to live like we’re dependent on it. Mercy started to follow me like a shadow, put me in situations where I would have to give it, and even more, where I’d have to seek it out.
This year, I gave myself the gift of therapy and self-work. Dr. A has changed my life in just eight weeks but I’d bet she’d say, “you’re doing all the work.” During our first meeting she, an amazing Black woman who reminds me of my cousins, asked: “So what brings you here.” My answer was long and revealing. I told her my theme for 2021 was : “life is until it ain’t” and for 2022, I decided on: “Get serious about the business of self.” I know more now than ever how fleeting life is, and I figured, if death is the only guarantee, then surely, living could be something I was serious about. I did not know then, like I do now, that getting serious about life meant figuring out the person looking back in the mirror and how they’re at the root, the main character, of each story in their life. Each week, I reveal a new brokenness and its connectedness to another; I leave simultaneously empowered and sometimes ashamed. How could I have done some of those things; how could I let love go by the wayside; in what world does one make it alone?
One session, I told Dr. A, I walked around with an anticipatory grief, of waiting for someone to transition into another thing. It was the same session I told her, for most of my life, I’ve been able to feel, or predicate when someone in my family journeyed to the other side. I told her about how my writing has been saturated with grief, yet not despair, almost an understanding of inevitability. I introduced her to Yellow, a dead young person who came to me in a dream. Yellow, pressed upon nothing but themselves, appeared at the mouth of a riverbank with a well coiled afro and faded blue oversized shirt, no pants and a smiling red bow. For months, the idea of Yellow floated through scrappy sentences on random notepads. I saw them before I saw their parents, standing in a clearing made possible by sturdy trees. Grieving parents and a dead child, running along the riverbank wanting waves to encapsulate them; galloping fauna and scurrying mice; jumpin catfish and who-ing owls, all vying for the attention of living things. I thought Yellow was preparing me to lose someone. Everything in their story, or at least this part I'd jumped into, seemed filled with anguish. Death, as it was, a welcomed release from heavy burden, which is, of course, that of living.
At the time, my grandmothers, whose love and prayers float me through, right into mercy, were both in the hospital. I dreaded what I thought Yellow was showing me; I went into prayer and therapy. In getting serious about life, I’m coming to understand how neglectful I’ve been to my people, who, through everything, have tried to love me. Like Yellow, an entire world was there, calling out to love me in my youth, smothering and heavy, at times, but always there. I never took it all in, though, and every week I learn how incomplete I’ve been without it. Incomplete, but in route. Hurt, but on the mend. I don’t talk to my family in the ways I should; I don’t travel home often, or even call home too frequently. As the time passes by, so do the excuses and untethered reasons for not crying out to show them my love. So, I stand in need of their mercy.
While running along the moving water, Yellow is met by a dark shadowy creature with chalk casting outlines across their face and long blonde hair touching the golden horse it rode upon. Within a blink, Yellow finds themselves encircled by more creatures with varying lengths of blonder hair and chalk patterns, covered in black masks and one wearing a red fabric with windows of detailed vignettes. Yellow, who raced a raging wave, fell four times and stayed down once, was finally frightened staring into those windows. Yellow saw their life shown back inside little windows marked in black, outlined in dark color, seeming to represent how Yellow never noticed the rainbow in the clouds. How do they know I cried all day and night? How could they know I hated myself so much I crisscrossed my legs? How do they know someone taught me to hate me? Presented back in this red way brought to fore how Yellow made it to gully alone attempting to outrun moving water, avoid rambling over mating mice, or starving the squirrels picking their pocket. In the red windows Yellow couldn’t believe there were no rainbows or lighter pictures; no smiling wonder or twinkling souls; only despair and darkness.
I wept. It was at this point of realization that Yellow noticed their father who cried, and cried, and cried. Yellow wept. Before the tears became overbearing, Yellow saw both of their parents, staring down, seeing nothing, weeping for more time and love. I cried again. I still don’t know why Yellow came to me last year, or why I couldn’t write about them until this one, but the other day, I think I figured it out. See, Dr. A knew about that anticipatory grief and she could see that I was growing and confronting, naming and acknowledging, assessing and improving, but what she didn’t know, until I said it is, I’m grieving a former version of myself. The one who chose to abandon and disregard, who tossed the loving and refused to forgive the trying. I’m grieving the one who told me I could, or should, do life alone, siloed, depending on my own. Each week in therapy, or every day on my yoga mat, every moment in between, I’m becoming a new thing. I’m grieving the person who never saw rainbows, or the love calling out to me; I’m finally becoming someone. Each week a new revelation, or insight comes, and because I know now, I have to confront it. I’m in route to wholeness and in this pursuit, there is a fight both in the flesh and Spirit. It is, Thank God, conversion.
I’ve walked this earth craving love and never allowing myself to feel it. I spent much early adulthood believing my people disliked, or were ashamed of me, that they could only be proud of my accolades and accomplishments. I lied to them and misrepresented myself for so long; I let my hurt, cause hurt, and it's never been acknowledged until now. Mercy. For the first time in my life, I’m saying how much I need love, and mercy, and goodness, and grace. I’m calling out for what I felt for so long, the little boy vying for unconditional love and protection needs in order to heal. For a long while I lied, unintentionally, about being healed and “moved on.” I thought I was; I believed it so heavily. I had to. Looking back in the mirror, however, I finally see all versions of myself, the broken and stationary, and, above all, the in route work in progress. The one caught in excuses and the one learning how to show up in truly radical ways for myself and my people.
As Black History Month comes to a close, mercy continues to demand my attention. As a amateur archivist committed to unearthing buried dreams and prayers, I’m learning how important it is to do something with these discoveries. It was James Baldwin who told us the crown we all ought to be wearing, is already bought and paid for. Ancestors. People who came before and survived, by hook or crook, ultimately landed here in time with us. They didn't have all that we do now and all that we do is because of them, therefore, getting serious about life isn’t so much about what was but about what will be. Because I know, I do. I’m asking for mercy as I do the everyday work of becoming not only a dutiful ancestor, but a living, lingering presence of mercy, goodness, grace, and above all, of love. I want the buck to stop here; the brokenness and moments of feeling loveless, the abandon and disregard, it ends with me. I won’t pass these on, so, here, I ask for Mercy.
Soon, I’ll be a certified yoga instructor. A few weeks ago, as we started sequencing our test class, we had to close our eyes and envision our future students. I thought, at first, I saw solely a room of beautifully Black folks, across every bit of difference. I can still see them. Days later, I had the chance to lead our class in a grounding meditation. This was shortly after I was in my kitchen repeating “mercy” while stirring my grits; after I finally named to Dr. A how, no matter how heavy the cross or long the journey, I was gonna keep a hold on life because the crown was bought and paid for. It was after I wrote in my journal, “I like him and I think I'm going to allow myself to rise in love.” Right around the time my soul pivoted toward healing so I can hug and love on those people who’ve always tried to do that for me, even and especially when they didn't fully understand. “ Inhale: I am worthy of mercy; Exhale: I can freely give it.” “Inhale: goodness holds me; Exhale: I am goodness.” “Inhale: I’m in route. Exhale: Mercy is the car.” I was overwhelmed with emotion, overcome by what was on my heart that Tuesday night. My classmates shared how necessary it was for them to sit in mercy, and there I realized who I see as my students, as people in practice with me. People, in route, bound up in mercy. Folk unafraid to practice mercy in the practice of freedom. Folk who get mercy solely for being alive, who we don't abandon or disregard, for that is an easy thing. It’s hard to live well, at times, because, as I am learning, it's a messy, unending business with little guidance or protection. Those are the people I see myself in the practice of life with.
So this morning, after a week of mixed emotions and discoveries, I'm asking for mercy. Mercy because I'm not just fighting to simply survive anymore, and I'm trying to build a life not in deficit but in overflow. I'm calling out for it because fight or flight isn’t guiding my life anymore. I’m pleading with you for it because I know too much now to go back to how it used to be. I know who I am now and I’m imperfect but in route. Sometimes bruised but unbent. I haven’t dropped my cross and I’ll help you carry yours, this time, I know how serious it is. I’m calling out for mercy because there is no other way I’ll make it without an overflow of it. It has to be mercy. Too many things in this world are bought and sold away; children starving and parents unhoused; health care and legal systems systematically taking people out; empires in decline and whiteness in its demise; the powerful move without integrity and the powerless struggle to band together. It has to be mercy. We can’t earn it; nor is it sparsely given; we don’t have to beg for it, and it doesn’t come in increments. Mercy is fresh, each new day. This is soul work as much as it is ‘fleshy.’ Even if you don’t call God what I do or believe They exist at all, surely you can still believe in mercy. Surely you know it’s mercy that pulls trees from the ground to provide shelter; I know you know its mercy to watch clouds blanket on hot days. Whenever you see, as Alice Walker told us, the color purple, certainly you know it’s mercy pulling the hues together.
Indeed. Mercy.
With death moving through, covering our homes and world like a blanket, we need a little divinity, just a touch of grace, an overflow of mercy. When the burden of this task to live well becomes nearly to grave to carry, let us reach for what God gives, and what we’re called to carry through. If it is true, like I believe in my very essence, God is in everyone and everything, let us, from the top of the world to the bottom, call out for Mercy.