“There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.”
- Bryan Stevenson in Just Mercy
The words that Bryan Stevenson wrote in his book Just Mercy have echoed in my own heart and mind and soul for the many months since I read that book. He wrote those words while poignantly describing his work representing Walter McMillian, an innocent man unjustly accused of murder. Eventually winning Walter’s release, Stevenson regularly finds himself face-to-face with some of the world’s deepest cruelties, its power to readily inflict the worst kind of suffering, its immeasurable brokenness put into action. One might think that this would cause Stevenson to crumble and to give up. And yet, he continued on, but only because he came to one realization: the capacity within him to endure this kind of injustice and prejudice would not come from his own smarts or abilities. It would not come from his own perseverance or endurance. It would only come, he realized, out of his own brokenness and the realization that it is that common brokenness that unites each of us.
Each us carries everywhere we go and through every day that we live a need for mercy, innumerable limitations that ensure each of us will come up short, an ever-present finitude that reminds us not only of our mortality but also our abundant shortcomings. And in the world in which we live, if you can just buy the right product or accumulate enough things you can live in a profound denial of just how true that is. If you achieve enough or if you are busy enough, you too can forget all the places you fall short, we are told.
I believe that we buy and work and try so hard to enter that kind of denial because we believe, sometimes right on the surface and sometimes somewhere deep down in ourselves, that if we show how broken and finite and limited we are, we won’t be loved. It is perhaps my greatest fear, and maybe yours too, that if anyone really knew the real me, they wouldn’t love me. Ultimately, we are worried that we are not enough.
The amazing, almost unbelievable thing about God’s love is that it regards none of that and wraps us in an embrace that cannot be shaken. When we are able to believe that God really does love us that much and that others can love us too, we see that our brokenness isn’t about shame or fear but is an invitation to deeper compassion, to more faithful mercy, to abundant grace.
The truth-telling we’ve been invited into in our world these last couple of weeks is that we have failed to let compassion and mercy bind our lives to one another. We have let power and greed and fear guide our actions. And, for white people, we have done this for 400+ years, enabling systems and structures that perpetuate this way of living throughout world and have fallen short in doing anything to change it. We have done so at the expense of and without regard for our black and brown siblings. Now, we are invited to confess just how wrong we have been so that one day, having confessed our failings and learned a new way, we might turn a corner. You and I must get honest with ourselves for how we have fallen short because we need to work for change now. It is in that work that we seek forgiveness, enact mercy, and show that a new way can emerge.
Stevenson writes, “Even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness we’re also in a web of healing and mercy.” The spinning of that web will begin when we face the truth of just how wrong we have been and just how broken we are. For in doing so, we come to see that we can set down our drives for more power, more money, more busyness, more recognition, and to let compassion and mercy guide us. It is then we we will see our lives inextricably linked one to another and all held in God’s loving embrace.