Mercy Now
Can "just mercy" lay the grounds for an inclusive civic community?
NOTE: On Easter, a day that celebrates mercy, POTUS posted a profane threat to annihilate an ancient people. Clearly, he is teetering on the edge of personal and political madness, and so are those who applaud his war crimes. But it’s not enough for those of us who oppose MAGA to name this insanity for what it is. In this post, I’m asking whether I have the capacity to look at the millions of ordinary Americans who support MAGA in a more generous way that might, eventually, contribute to healing the body politic—once we rid ourselves of the tyrants. Spoiler Alert: there’s no resolution here, only me wrestling with my better angels. I welcome company…
I. I’m not sure why I find bluesy music so comforting. My best guess is that it offers emotional honesty about hard things, set to tunes with a heartbeat that says “life goes on.” Maybe that’s why “Mercy Now” by singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier has been a go-to song for me during the decade-plus that MAGA’s been breaking my heart with its callous disdain for love, truth and justice.
If you don’t know “Mercy Now,” please take a few minutes to listen by clicking HERE. The rest of this post revolves around what the song stirs in me…
II. The cry for “mercy” is often connected with surrendering to the enemy to end one’s suffering. But in Gauthier’s song, it becomes a cry to life itself to make our lives more livable in the midst of the suffering that comes with being human. The first verse is a case in point: “My father sure could use a little mercy now / The fruits of his labor / Fall and rot slowly on the ground / His work is almost over / It won’t be long and he won’t be around / I love my father, and he could use some mercy now.”
There’s no way around the suffering elders often have to endure while they watch the work they’ve done fall away, as it always does. My father spent his last decade watching the global economy take down the business he loved, to which he had devoted much of his life. I felt his pain deeply, and I feel a similar pain today as I watch MAGA reverse so many democratic advances my generation helped secure.
My father, a Republican, could not have stomached MAGA. He believed in the inherent worth of all human beings. But he would have felt empathy for part of MAGA’s base—older white men who spent their lives working at jobs and places that no longer exist, creating things that are no longer needed. I’m angry at those men for helping deliver us into MAGA hell. But when I hear Mary Gauthier sing, “my father could use a little mercy now,” I can’t argue, and I feel indicted.
III. “Mercy Now” was written in the early 2000s, but the lyrics read as if they were written about MAGA’s base. In the second verse, Gauthier sings about her brother who’s “a stranger to freedom / shackled to his fears and doubts,” and lives in pain “almost more than living will allow.”
Sadly, her words describe a lot of the younger men who put MAGA in power, not once but twice. Some are in psychological pain (70% of all male suicides are among middle-aged white men), and some are in physical pain (self-medicating with whatever they can afford). MAGA and POTUS apparently give them a “manly” sense of meaning that anesthetizes their pain. Some find POTUS (to quote one of their gurus) a “study in peak alpha masculinity for the ages.” Right. And pigs can fly.
I lack the words to express how miserably misguided I find men like this to be, or to express the anger I feel at their inability to take responsibility for the personal darkness which gives rise to their politics. But when I hear Mary Gauthier sing, “my brother could use a little mercy now,” I can’t argue, and I feel indicted again.
IV. As for church and country, I can’t say it better than Mary Gauthier: “My Church and my Country could use a little mercy now / As they sink into a poisoned pit / That’s going to take forever to climb out / They carry the weight of the faithful / Who follow ‘em down / I love my Church and Country and they could use some mercy now.”
I will never understand why some Christians glorify the MAGA president, who has spent his life trampling on virtually everything Jesus taught. How can they embrace a man whose Easter message to the world reads like it was written by heavily armed psychopath? “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”
The role Christianity plays in empowering MAGA and POTUS is diabolical. I don’t use that word lightly, but when leaders of both church and state play footsie with evil, my disdain knows no bounds. And yet, when I hear Mary Gauthier singing, “I love my Church and Country and they could use some mercy now,” I can’t argue, and again I feel indicted.
V. “Mercy Now” ends with these words: “Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now / I know we don’t deserve it / But we need it anyhow / We hang in the balance / Dangled ‘tween hell and hallowed ground / Every single one of us could use some mercy now.” With this verse, I find myself not looking out at others, but inward at myself.
Looking back on my eight-seven years, it’s clear to me that I would not be here without the mercies granted me by a variety of people, or without the great mercy that gave me life itself and has allowed me to continue to enjoy the gift. As Mary Gauthier sings, “I know I don’t deserve it / But I need it anyhow.”
In her brilliant memoir, Saved by a Song, Gauthier writes: “‘Mercy Now’ came to me as a prayer in a time when loved ones and the world around me were sinking into darkness. The song brought catharsis, and then, unexpectedly, it brought something else. The desperation I’d felt, laced with anger and fear, began to give way to a new calm. I began to feel connected.” I want that feeling, too, as we all should: the future of our democracy depends on it.
VI. Like it or not, we are connected to everyone—those we love, those we are indifferent to, and those we cannot abide. Rescuing our democracy from the jaws of alienation depends on expanding our sense of who “We the People” are. MAGA will fail eventually, and when it does, we’ll need an American version of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to move ahead. But we’ll never get there unless we can work on showing mercy to our political enemies.
What does mercy look like in action? For me, the answer to that question is a work in progress, but this much I know: mercy does not involve cheap forgiveness for powerful people who’ve committed crimes against humanity, or for those who support them out of pure hatred for “the alien other.” Instead, it is an opening of the heart that prepares the way for a civic community based on inclusion, not a “new and improved” version of MAGA’s exclusionary cult.
Bryan Stevenson—founder of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and author of Just Mercy—has this to say about his core idea: “The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence….”
VII. As I said in my opening note, I have no resolution to offer here. I offer only an invitation to let the idea of “mercy now” steep in your heart as a way to move beyond our current plight, which Mary Gauthier describes so well: “We hang in the balance / Dangled ‘tween hell and hallowed ground.” As we work toward defanging the mad dogs of MAGA in the midterms, we need to envision what we want America to look like when MAGA is out of power. Then we need to cultivate the habits of the heart that will help make it so.
[NOTES: Mary Gauthier’s website is HERE. My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post.]
Parker, Thank you so much for this post. These are questions I deeply grapple with. My father, a Republican all his life, died 13 years ago after his successful business career failed and then illness struck him. I often wonder where he would be on MAGA. It was Bryan Stevenson's words that began to melt the hardness in me, the racism, the anger many years ago. "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done." Yes. And yet, how do we stand up with grace? Richard Rohr says that the most meaningful posture is to live with the tensions we feel. I think about this a lot. Your courage in naming these things and the beauty with which you do it is extraordinary.
I struggle mightily with my feelings of hatred and anger. Hatred doesn’t stop hatred, but the struggle is real. Having now heard Mary Gauthier’s song for the first time, I feel strong enough to continue. Thanks for reminding me that the struggle is worth it.