For International Women’s Day be a Social Mercy Warrior

Doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?

The very first time I heard the term Social Justice Warrior I was vaguely appalled. It took me a long time to figure out what I didn’t like about it, but really, each of the three words, Social, Justice, and Warrior sit uneasily for me as a Christian.

As I like to say, I’m not from here. When I was sixteen I was forced to come back to America for sixth months and go to a public high school. Adolescence is bad enough, and sixteen can be poignantly miserable. Add in a move across the world, for however short a time, and it was the perfect storm of not being able to even–although I had not the gift of that brilliant expression at the time.

Plus, sixteen year olds can be jerks. So everyone knew how miserable I was, and how culturally unmoored. One of the things that rattled me most was the idea that people have certain Rights–unalienable rights given in the constitution, but also blamed on God. By virtue of being alive and being American I have the right to my own life, to the pursuit of happiness–a concept I still cannot entirely fathom–and liberty.

I went with all relief back to Mali as soon as those six months were over and never thought about the rights of the human at all again, except sometimes to notice that westerners like to come to Africa to bestow gifts, large pieces of machinery, money, and the idea that all the women, on International Women’s Day, should have to stop their useful work and relationships to gather in a low concrete building and do absurd activities like paint murals about what it means to be a woman. This, when I heard about it, struck me as patronizing, besides being a gigantic waste of time, the only benefit of which would be to make some white western young woman feel that she had done something to enlighten the unenlightened. As if she, with her women’s studies degree, could teach anyone anything.

But then I came back to America and to all my rights, only this time, as time crept ever forward, there was the addition of the word Justice.

Justice, combined with the word Warrior, seems to me like a child bent on playing with matches. You run after the child, trying to pry not only the match out of his hand, but the foolishness out of his head. But because he wants to light a fire, he can’t hear you. You have to get the matches away because he can’t hear you.

The person who is bent on both Justice and Warrioring has got himself in rather a dangerous spot. (As a nod to international women’s day, and the day without the woman, I will use male pronouns so that it seems like I’m complaining about men.) In the first place, he thinks he can arbitrate justly. He isn’t in a court of law. He doesn’t have a gavel and a black robe. He probably hasn’t studied jurisprudence. But he does have lots of feelings about things being fair, about how the world should be run, about other people being down on their luck. And he might also have a smart phone and a YouTube channel. Who knows. But justice is his thing.

The danger isn’t just that he’ll beclown himself on the Internet. The danger is that some say he is going to die, and the very idea that he would want to be treated justly at that point is absurd. Justice, at the cosmic divine level means that you, in your rejection of God, get to die forever, no matter what gender or sex you are, nor how rich or poor. When you are standing before the judgment throne of a perfect God faced with the reality of who you are, you would be foolish beyond measure to bring up your rights, to begin a discussion of how unfair it all was, to enumerate your goodness relative to the badness of all others. No, at that point, what you want, what you really Really want is Mercy.

Justice is where you get what you deserve. Mercy is where God absorbs that deserving in himself and let’s you go free. You want mercy. Really. And you probably want to give mercy too.

Because justice, if that’s your operating principle, makes you constantly the person sizing up and measuring who is right and who is wrong. You have to judge, if you’re going to be worried about justice. You have to think about the oppressor and the oppressed. You have to be angry about something. You have to wield your phone and your twitter handle on behalf of those, or perhaps even yourself, who deserve more than they’re getting.

Mercy, on the other hand, takes you out of the judge’s seat and not only makes you a nicer person to be around, it means that you’re not playing with cosmic fire. If you decide to have mercy on someone–not worrying at all about what he deserves or what his rights are, but rather considering him in the moment, right there–you’re going to be able to give that person true freedom. Mercy is grounded in the cosmic soothing balm of forgiveness and grace. Mercy is the cross, not the throne. It may be a painful place to be, but water, for the time being, has been poured all over the matches and so you can sit there and not be set ablaze.

Justice means someone is going to be blamed, someone is going to be held accountable. Mercy pulls the wrong person, the broken person, the oppressor And the oppressed out of a ditch and sets him on his feet.

Mercy is the foundation of good and true society. The strongest person is the one who is always having mercy, always forgiving, always helping. That ripples out in every direction, soothing the brittle tinder fire of people trying to get what’s theirs.

It’s not that there can’t be justice, or won’t be. It’s that we shouldn’t be that excited about it. Where it has to occur, even in a court of law, we should be anxiously cautious, praying for truth and goodness for judges, and hope for the hopeless. Every single one his own judge is catastrophic for social human relationships. Each one doesn’t come closer to the other–to know, to understand, to help–but rather is ever more fractured and broken by all the divisions humanity naturally embraces.

Mercy, on the other hand, is a deep current, a balm, a gentle rain, a dignifying posture in a fractured and foolish world. If you have to do something, have mercy on someone. Forgive him for being wrong. Help her up out of her difficulty. Look outside of yourself and be caught up in the life of another.