Epilogue and Postscript
“Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion. Walter genuinely forgave the people who unfairly accused him, the people who convicted him, and the people who had judged him unworthy of mercy. And in the end, it was just mercy toward others that allowed him to recover a life worth celebrating, a life that rediscovered the love and freedom that all humans desire, a life that overcame death and condemnation until it was time to die on God’s schedule.” Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, p. 314
And so Walter got to die on God’s schedule. His story of redemption and resurrection, all the stories of the broken and discarded, the long suffering, in this beautifully sad book ring in my ears the imperative to do more. We must in hope go down into the dark places of fear and bigotry, and be as Bryan Stevenson describes, the “stonecatchers” catching the stones of injustice. We must expand our circles of compassion and friendship to include people who don’t look like us. We must care less for our comfort, the appeasement of our righteousness, and allow the cries of the poor and undeserving to break and convict us. We must condemn less and listen more.
After our tiring election and its outcome, an outcome that stripped away the delusion that white America, my America can’t be that racist, I needed a listening place. I traveled back to my home in the hills of West Virginia with three parishioners to participate in adult week at Nazareth Farm. We did our chores, put on roofs, built ramps, and painted walls but mostly we listened. We stood in a circle in an empty kitchen before any work was done and listened to a man talk of suffering and love. He talked of the pain that prevented him from bending and the love of his wife willing to wipe his bottom and his pride that prevented him from accepting. He talked of fixing up this house so he could bring his adult son home to him, a son going blind and dying of a degenerative disease. In the end, we broke our circle and I thanked him for sharing. I told him it sounded like he had been walking a hard road for a long time. He told me of a terrible darkness so deep that he was ready to kill himself, a shotgun on his lap, and he would have pulled the trigger but for the love of his wife and grandchild catching him and pulling him back- another stone caught.
At the end of the weekend, I walked down to the creek. The sun was shining and I waded into the cold water looking for heart-shaped stones. We will pray with these stones the way God was revealed and I will give them to my sons when we return. A staff member noticed me there but did not recognize me. He shouted, “Bill, is that you?” and I cry, “Yes, it is me.”
Though there will still be suffering and darkness ahead, the sun is shining, there is hope, and I am standing in the water catching stones, the only place I need to be.
Bill Alt
