Sometimes mercy requires a hug

Once every three months, I spend an evening driving with a chaplain to Nebraska’s death row. The chaplain, a woman who is a spiritual director to a death row inmate, organizes the group visit and submits our names.

I can’t say I was thrilled about the prospect the first time I did it. As an organizer for Nebraskans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, I knew I had a responsibility to learn as much as I could about death row, and I must admit I was curious.

But I was also apprehensive. And when our visit ended, and everyone started hugging the inmates good-bye, I was a bit taken aback. I’m not a hugger by nature, but I’ve learned that hugging a condemned man good-bye is a good thing.

On one of our journeys, the chaplain told me that her mother had impressed upon the family the importance of the corporal works of mercy.
“But oddly,” she said, “we never talked about visiting the imprisoned.”

And oddly, I had never thought until then about my little trip to death row fulfilling one of the corporal works of mercy. It was just something I did.
Thankfully, Pope Francis has propelled us to think more deeply about the meaning of mercy.

When Kerry Weber wrote the intro to her book, “Mercy in the City, How to Feed the Hungry, Give Drink to the Thirsty, Visit the Imprisoned, and Keep Your Day Job,” she quoted from Pope Francis’ interview with America magazine, the Jesuit monthly for whom she works.

“And the ministers of the church must be ministers of mercy above all,” Francis said.

Weber’s book is a short, reflective plunge into the basics of the corporal works of mercy, and our need to embrace them, as the pope says. Weber is like most of us: trying to figure out this mercy thing.

“Mercy in the City” is newly out this year and was used by Creighton University’s online ministries as a discussion book.

If you work with faith formation, you might want to read it now and plan on incorporating it into next year’s Lenten study, for adults or teens, with perhaps some journaling done along with it.

sometimes giving a homeless person your sandwich is not as important as stopping to chat

Weber discovers that sometimes giving a homeless person your sandwich is not as important as stopping to chat. She cleans out her closet and then helps distribute clothing at a Catholic Worker home, discovering that it’s hard to enforce the rules about how much one person is allowed to take.

An alumna of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Weber is a former Mercy Volunteer Corps member, a 20-something who lives in an apartment in New York and subscribes to an online dating service.

She’s Catholic through and through, but with a refreshing youthful spirit. She’s the young Catholic you hope to see in the pew next to you, or better yet, the young Catholic you hope to raise.

Weber’s experiment with mercy is entirely hands-on. She spends the night in a men’s homeless shelter, and accompanies a prison chaplain to visits. She makes plans to visit the sick and help bury the dead.

Writing a check — my frequent mercy stand-in — never appears in this book. Mercy here is relational, the kind that Saint Francis employed when he embraced the leper. That’s the challenge, isn’t it? Sometimes mercy demands a hug.

The writer is formerly from Anchorage. She now lives in Omaha, Neb.