My new niece Addison
In the Christian bible, the writer Matthew ascribes the following saying to Jesus: "Go and learn what this means: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners."
The phrase is haunting me. Go and learn what this means. How does one go and learn mercy? I realize that it haunts me because, for the most part, my life situation doesn't require mercy all that often. And, my life path does not intersect persons in desperate, visible need of mercy all that often.
And both of those, I think, reflect sin. Sinful institutions, sinful societies, sinful individual decisions, because the people that I name as brothers and sisters are in need of mercy. And if they need it and I don't, then we are divided. And division, especially division between the suffering and the not-suffering, is sinful.
Perhaps the best way to go and learn is to enter situations vulnerably, to join with the vulnerable. But I don't know.
The phrase is haunting me. Go and learn what this means. How does one go and learn mercy? I realize that it haunts me because, for the most part, my life situation doesn't require mercy all that often. And, my life path does not intersect persons in desperate, visible need of mercy all that often.
And both of those, I think, reflect sin. Sinful institutions, sinful societies, sinful individual decisions, because the people that I name as brothers and sisters are in need of mercy. And if they need it and I don't, then we are divided. And division, especially division between the suffering and the not-suffering, is sinful.
Perhaps the best way to go and learn is to enter situations vulnerably, to join with the vulnerable. But I don't know.
Picture posted on www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=8524
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