Change your language!

O my people weep with me”, are the words of a popular Catholic hymn. We think of Enterprise and other areas of Trinidad, not to mention swathes of families where there is so much violence, hardness and weeping. The victims are too many.

The Ester message tells us God wants no more victims: He who offered himself as an innocent victim longed for a world without victims. Christians don’t have a choice; we have to work for a world without victims.

Many say: “Let’s be realistic. A world full of victims is part of the natural human landscape.” In the nasty business of war, we call potential victims “soft targets” and actual victims “collateral damage”.

In our society, mentally ill persons are seen as non-persons who are vilified, manhandled, beaten and shot. The prisoner who dies in his cell under questionable circumstances got what he was looking for, a victim of his own way of life that got him there in the first place.

Is another language possible? Thomas of today’s gospel says yes. But he is a realist. He wants to test this ridiculous notion of resurrection, and he’s right! He gets his way as Jesus invites him to stick his finger into the holes in His hand and His side. Thomas then affirms the Resurrection, “My Lord and my God”: his language changes. And so must ours if we are a resurrection people. We need to move beyond “Unruly ISIS”, “dem mad people: us vs them.

Pope Francis suggests a necessary balm to soothe our harsh language - mercy. To the hardness of building walls he offers bridge building; to the harshness of populism and sclerotic nationalism he offers solidarity and opening borders; in place of the idolatry of money he offers a simple lifestyle where less is more. This language of mercy is slowly being embedded in structures of society: legal luminaries are quietly working to make mediation mandatory to reduce the backlog in the courts and offer a cheaper route to resolving conflict; there is a growing awareness that capital punishment is not an effective weapon in solving capital crimes; the rights of gay people are slowly being respected.

Our language of mercy often comes up against cries for justice. Sometimes the Church is seen as myopic and insensitive to the plight of victims who cry out for justice, not mercy. Their cries must be heard and justice must as far as possible be secured.

Very few people get justice these days as the courts are still clogged and crime detection rates poor. But sometimes the breadth of evil is so monstrous the only real weapons to use to bring closure are forgiveness and mercy. Cardinal Walter Kasper notes that over many years an artificial separation came about between justice and mercy and that in the Bible God’s justice is His mercy.

On this Divine Mercy Sunday, let us not add harshness and hardness to the world. Let us “put on Christ” and change the way we speak of and view the world.