The following is a guest post by María del Pilar Desangles, Assistant Director at the Center for Community Service & Justice at Loyola University Maryland.
Desangles holds a B.A. in Anthropology from University of Central Florida and a M.S.Ed. in Community and Social Change from the University of Miami. She is an active member of St. Matthews Catholic Church and LEAD Ministry (LGBT Educating & Affirming Diversity). Desangles joined the St. Matthew’s Pastoral council in 2015. Previously, she worked with an immigrant farmworker community in Central Florida where she was the Director of Service Learning at Hope CommUnity Center.
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Pope Francis declared 2016 as the "Jubilee Year of Mercy" for Catholics. Because of this, I have been wrestling with the meaning of mercy. What does it mean to show mercy to one another? Where is the intersection of mercy and justice? Practically, how do we create a more just Baltimore?
The Muslim scholar Najeeba Syeed challenges us to foster restorative systems and healing spaces. I find this both an exhilarating and daunting task. The uprising that took place in Baltimore in 2015 was a consequence of racism and poverty that disproportionately affects communities of color. Can we as a community embrace our individual and collective power in order to create spaces for reconciliation, spaces that bring us closer to be in right relationship with one another, and spaces where we can find community and support that so many of us are searching for and need?
I found myself deeply searching for mercy after the Orlando massacre. As a gay Latina who spent a significant part of my formative years living in Orlando, it was challenging at best to look at what happened through a lens of mercy.
I did not want to debate gun policy, or engage the media's obsession with exploiting every detail of the events, or read Islamophobic comments on my Facebook feed. After losing those 49 brothers and sisters, I am overwhelmed with the phrase "STOP the HATE". All of the hate.
Orlando was such a powerful reminder that the safe spaces are never 100% safe, but that cannot stop me from being who I am and from opening up to dialogue. I have to be myself, and take a leap of faith whenever I come out as gay in environments that have the potential to be hostile. That is the only way other people will have the courage to let me see their full selves.
When I practice mercy with myself by being a proud gay Latina, by not succumbing to internalized self-hatred, I can be open to real dialogue with others. When we act from the belief that every single person we interact with is a human being with a story, hopes, and dreams, I believe we begin to foster systems that are restorative and spaces that are healing.
As a religious woman, I also struggle with mercy as it relates to my Catholicism. I am an openly gay, married, millennial, immigrant, Catholic Latina. It is overwhelming and depressing to think about how the institutional Catholic Church treats the LGBTQ+ community and women.
But there are many sides of the Catholic Church. For example, the space within the Catholic Church that brought my wife and me together is a space that affirms the Godliness in every single living being. It is a space within the Catholic Church that draws from its rich Jewish inheritance in Micah 6:8 "...to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."
I can get caught up in my own harsh judgment of the institutional Church because some of their doctrines tell me that I do not belong. My own pain can prevent me from engaging in dialogue, despite the institutional imperfections of the Church. I believe that the only way to change the institution is by claiming space within my Church. In this space I find healing, community, and solace. By challenging myself to see the humanity of the people who do not agree with me, and letting them see my own humanity, I find unexpected healing and freedom.
What is the connection between justice and mercy? What I know from my experience is that mercy and justice have to be grounded in fully embracing our differences rather than trying to control who gets to speak and which issues of justice are validated.
For example, the Governor of Florida initially tried to discuss the massacre in Orlando while neglecting to mention that the victims were LGBTQ+. Or consider when the media displays the boarded up homes in the neighborhoods of the Baltimore uprising while neglecting to explain decades of institutionalized racism and wealth inequality that shaped those neighborhoods.
We need to talk about root causes of injustice in a merciful way, in a way where we do not further isolate one another.
It is easy to think about what happened in Orlando, and what happens every single day in my new home, Baltimore, to many young black men, like Freddie Gray, and act as if we can easily define victims and perpetrators. Depending on who you are, and where you come from, who is the victim and who is the perpetrator may vary. Justice is more complicated than that.
The challenge is being continually open to seeing the humanity in other people, and representing that in every aspect of life. Justice means being doggedly open to the dignity of every person and practicing that in all aspects of our lives.
When I woke up to Orlando, my wife and I went to mass as we had planned. There we cried, openly throughout the mass. We found solace in the space and community that we have claimed for ourselves within this institution. After mass our priest ran up to us with tears in his eyes, letting us that know that we would do something as a parish community to honor Orlando.
This is radical mercy where from tragedy and struggle we can make room for each other. Through this practice we can gently challenge one another to claim our space within society, to blur the ubiquitous boxes our institutions perpetually impose, and to begin to imagine different systems, whose practices are healing and restorative.
This is the same radical understanding of mercy that made me want to be a part of the Community Leaders Cohort at the ICJS, to be part of an interreligious dialogue where we are actively making space to hear one another’s stories. Mercy is when we acknowledge the dignity of each person and the precious divinity each one of us holds. This practice will bring us closer to the beloved community.
The city of Baltimore is part of a national conversation around questions of justice, race and community. At this pivotal moment in our city’s history, indeed our nation’s history, the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies highlights the continued importance of bringing diverse religious perspectives to address civic and social challenges. In the initiative Imagining Justice in Baltimore the ICJS will contribute the perspectives of local Jews, Christians and Muslims to the public conversation about justice, and injustice, in Baltimore. Each contributor represents her or his own opinion. We welcome this diversity of perspective and are not seeking a single definition of justice between traditions, nor denying the multivocal nature of justice within traditions. The long-term goal of the Imagining Justice in Baltimore initiative is to create a model of interreligious learning and dialogue around differences that demonstrates how a robust commitment to religious pluralism can shape public life.