Parents, the First Evangelists
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Road to Purity
Working with children (and raising a batch with my husband), I've picked up a few critical pieces of information about how children learn. For example, children require simple explanations in terms they can understand instinctively. Children also have little patience for information or activities that seem irrelevant to their concerns; they learn new concepts best when they can relate to the topic personally.
Pope Francis knows this well, which is why he hopes families, in this Year of Mercy, will provide children with an experience of mercy.
In his book-length interview, The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis helps us all understand mercy by defining it in theological terms and then also giving us concrete, practical examples of what mercy feels like in daily life. Parents, grandparents, and teachers who want to share the Year of Mercy with children in their lives will find a wealth of wisdom in Pope Francis.
The Theology of Mercy
On page 87 of The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis quotes two documents by St. Ambrose:
These forceful lines challenge and astonish us, just as the lines from Easter's Vigil's "Proclamation of Easter":
“O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” — The Exsultet
God's love never takes the easy way out. As St. Ambrose says, God actually prefers to lavish on us love that hurts, that requires sacrifice. Anyone can love lovable folk, but our almighty God transforms the universe by pouring out gratuitous, indulgent, humble love to disobedient creatures in weakness and distress. We can sing about how "happy" Original Sin is, because only by becoming miserable could we experience the limitless love of God for us.
God loves us in this merciful way. What's more, God calls us to love others mercifully, too. In The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis makes up a word to describe this way of loving: mercifying. God wants us to mercify the world.
Sadly, mercifying is an impossible task; ON OUR OWN, we can neither produce nor sustain sacrificial love. Nowhere in nature do we see examples of self-forgetful, inexhaustible love. Each of us can easily come up with a dozen examples of how we have campaigned for preferential treatment, public recognition, or positions of honor. Heck, I always hunt through the produce bins, ensuring I will choose only the very best of what is offered; some other sucker can take home the grapefruits with scratches on the rinds, right?
Opting for deformity, preferring lowliness when more perfect options are available? That's God's wheelhouse. That's mercy. Mercy is not human, but divine:
“What is impossible for human beings is possible for God.” — Luke 18:27
Thanks be to God, we can access every bit of the mercy we desire to give just by asking for it: "Ask and it will be given to you" (Matthew 7:7).
Defining Mercy for Children
I have tried many ways of describing mercy to children. The definition that works best expresses mercy in terms of power.
Mercy means having power, and choosing to using that power to help others, not hurt them.
Children who know super hero stories can relate to this easily. While villains use their powers to destroy others and make the world "Mine! All Mine!", super heroes use their powers to fix disasters and help people in danger.
Children (and even teenagers) often think they don't have any real power. Their lives are heavily scripted by outside forces: parents, teachers, societal expectations, etc. But as a dear friend of mine always tells the children in the school she heads, "the remarkable thing is that you always have a choice."
Truly, children do have a choice. They have all kinds of power to choose their behavior, attitudes, and words. When speaking to groups of children, I ask, "Do you have power over your parents? For example, do you have a choice when your mom tells you to set the table?" They always shout, "NO!" But then we reflect on several options:
All of these choices have consequences. All of these choices affect the family in concrete ways.
Discussing mercy in terms of power helps children realize they do have power, even when they feel they are being forced to do something. And children can use their power destructively, by causing pain or distress, or mercifully, by building others up.
I love using Oscar Wilde's story of The Selfish Giant to let the message of mercy sink in. The giant owns a fabulous garden. It is rightly his own place. He has the power to share it or not. As the title suggests (spoiler alert!), he chooses not to share:
“‘My own garden is my own garden,’ said the Giant; ‘any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.’ So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.” — The Selfish Giant
Most parents want their children to learn how to share. In this Year of Mercy, we can tie that universal standard of good will to God's plan of mercy for the world. The Selfish Giant shows that even something as simple as sharing a toy reflects God's love. Children, like adults, have power, and mercy demands that we always use our power to build up the Kingdom.
Children as Mercifyers
Defining mercy is one thing, but how can we encourage children to "mercify" the world?
In The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis lists three suggestions:
Here are some ideas for acting on the Pope's suggestions:
Read Gospel stories and parables that show mercy in action
Pope Francis discusses mercy all the time. From the April 2015 papal bull announcing the Year of Mercy (Misericordiae Vultus) to The Name of God Is Mercy, and in dozens of homilies and audiences, Pope Francis glows when he speaks of God's mercy. Mining as many of these resources as possible, I have come up with a list of Jesus' stories and parables most often cited by Pope Francis. These narratives will ignite our children's religious imaginations and show them what mercy looks like to Jesus:
Talk freely with children about those stories and about how to be merciful
Let's not be narrow in our definitions, here! Which children should we be talking to? Any of them. All of them.
Give children an experience of mercy
Amid all of the excellent theology Pope Francis examines to provide a definition of mercy, he continually returns to the need to experience mercy in a personal way. Part of experiencing mercy is allowing ourselves to fail, to suffer, to grieve over sin.
“The most important thing in the life of every man and every woman is not that they should never fail along the way. The important thing is always to get back up, not to stay on the ground licking your wounds. The Lord of mercy always forgives me; he always offers me the possibility of starting over.” — The Name of God Is Mercy, page 60
Do we take this to heart? Do we genuinely desire to be with our children, even when they irritate us? Even when they are weak--perhaps habitually so?
Our desire for perfect children, perfectly behaved at church, enormously successful in school, popular with peers, settled in a career and house--this quest for perfection can lead us away from mercy. Desiring good things for our children is natural and beautiful, of course; requiring their success as a condition of our affection (even subconsciously) is where mercy unravels.
We want good things for our children. But whatever good things we want, God wants infinitely more. As Pope Francis says in Misericordiae Vultus, "let us allow God to surprise us." We may think we know just exactly which good things will help our children the most, just exactly which blessings will bring them face to face with Jesus. On the other hand, God has a tendency to know more than us, and to be infinitely more creative than us. We cannot be afraid of the sin and pain that might draw our children far closer to God's merciful heart than we ever imagined.
That is why we call the day of our Lord's cruel death Good Friday. In and of itself, a torturous, unjust execution is not "good." God's limitless wisdom surprises us by calling it Good Friday because on that day God showed us just how extreme his merciful love for us is. Children will hear the Passion story on Good Friday or look at a crucifix and ask why Jesus is dead on there; we can tell them that Jesus dies to show us he knows what it's like to be sad, teased, beaten, and exhausted. God knows--personally--how to share our sadness, even to death.
Good Friday should comfort children, then. They can know that nothing, NOTHING, can separate them from the love of God. It feels easy to love God when things are going well, but Good Friday reminds us to stay close to the Heart of Jesus in terrible times too. No sin, no sorrow, no seemingly hopeless situation is outside the mercy of God. Children can imagine how sad Jesus' disciples felt when their teacher died instead of leading a victorious army through Jerusalem, scattering the Romans.
Those three days till Easter must have been agony. Our children will one day know that kind of agony, if they haven't already. The Good News is that our Lord has already conquered agony and death and accompanies us through our own suffering. We can put all our trust in the Lord.
Jesus, I trust in you.
“In this Jubilee Year, let us allow God to surprise us. He never tires of casting open the doors of his heart and of repeating that he loves us and wants to share his love with us. The Church feels the urgent need to proclaim God’s mercy. Her life is authentic and credible only when she becomes a convincing herald of mercy.” — Misericordiae Vultus
We parents, like mother Church herself, have to get this mercy thing right. We will fail, of course, but that's a sure way to dig even deeper into God's mercy.
©Grace Mazza Urbanski, 2016
Grace Mazza Urbanski is the author of Pray with Me: Seven Simple Ways to Pray with Your Children (Ave Maria Press, 2015). Grace teaches high school English at Brookfield Academy in Wisconsin and previously served as national director of children’s ministry with the Apostleship of Prayer. She continues to share her insights on prayer with parents, teachers, and children as a regular contributor to Catechist magazine and keynote speaker and workshop designer for events throughout the United States.
