This and other sections in the Tool Box chapter on Spirituality and Community Building (Chapter 28) have been written with the support and contributions of experts connected with the Charter for Compassion. For more information about the Charter and its work, visit www.charterforcompassion.org.
Introduction
Mercy is one way of describing a compassionate response to wrongdoing, suffering, conflict, or another person's vulnerability.
Different religious, cultural, philosophical, legal, and secular traditions understand mercy differently. In some settings, mercy refers specifically to a person with authority choosing not to impose the full punishment available to them. In others, it describes compassion expressed through action.
For community-building purposes, this section uses mercy broadly to mean responding to harm or need with compassion while also considering safety, rights, responsibility, accountability, and appropriate repair.
Mercy should not mean ignoring harm, excusing misconduct, requiring forgiveness, overlooking unequal power, or denying people consequences or protections provided by law or organizational policy.
Mercy can complement justice, accountability, and repair. It should not be used to replace them when they are necessary.
Community builders may find the concept useful when deciding how to respond to mistakes, conflict, suffering, wrongdoing, or situations in which people need assistance.
The aim is not to establish mercy as the answer to every conflict. It is to consider when compassionate responses can reduce harm while respecting the rights and choices of everyone involved.
Mercy, Compassion, and Justice
Mercy and compassion overlap, but they are not identical.
Compassion involves recognizing another person's suffering or difficulty and responding with concern.
Mercy often arises when a person or institution has some ability to impose consequences, withhold assistance, or otherwise affect another person's circumstances.
That difference matters because mercy can involve power.
Community builders should therefore ask:
- Who has decision-making authority?
- Who experienced harm?
- Who is responsible for the harm?
- What rights or protections apply?
- What accountability is appropriate?
- What repair is possible?
- What response reduces rather than increases harm?
Basic rights, disability accommodations, due process, safety, fair treatment, and services to which people are entitled should not be described as acts of mercy.
Part I: Understanding Mercy
Possible Benefits of a Merciful Approach
A compassionate and accountable response to conflict may help people:
- Understand what happened
- Reduce unnecessary escalation
- Protect people from further harm
- Take responsibility for their own actions
- Identify appropriate repair
- Establish clearer boundaries
- Rebuild some forms of trust when participants want to do so
- Improve policies or practices that contributed to the problem
These outcomes are possible rather than guaranteed.
Compassion alone cannot resolve every conflict, and a warm relationship should not substitute for formal accountability when serious harm has occurred.
Mercy in Religious, Cultural, and Secular Traditions
Teachings related to mercy, compassion, forgiveness, restraint, generosity, accountability, and care appear in many religious and philosophical traditions.
No single tradition speaks for all cultures or communities, and mercy should not be described as having one universal meaning.
Some people understand mercy through faith. Others understand similar values through human rights, secular ethics, restorative practice, cultural traditions, professional responsibility, or personal conviction.
Community programs should make room for those differences.
A Working Definition
In this section, a merciful community response has three practical elements:
- Understanding: gathering enough information to understand what happened, who was affected, and what conditions contributed to the situation.
- Accountability: identifying responsibility and determining what obligations follow from it.
- Repair: taking appropriate steps to address harm and reduce the likelihood that it will happen again.
Forgiveness may also be important to some people, but it is personal and voluntary rather than a required part of mercy.
1. Seek Understanding
Understanding can help community members respond more accurately to conflict or harm.
This may involve:
- Establishing what happened
- Distinguishing facts from assumptions
- Listening to people directly affected
- Considering context
- Identifying relevant policies or laws
- Understanding differences in power
- Considering previous incidents or patterns
Understanding another person's circumstances does not require agreeing with their behavior or treating every perspective as equally accurate.
Some claims can be supported by evidence while others cannot. Some people may also bear substantially more responsibility for a harm than others.
Avoid creating false equivalence simply because several perspectives exist.
Listen Carefully
Listening can improve understanding when people have a meaningful opportunity to explain their experiences.
Useful practices include:
- Allow people enough time to speak
- Ask clarifying questions
- Summarize what you believe you heard
- Allow the speaker to correct your interpretation
- Avoid assuming that body language reveals what a person is thinking
- Recognize language, disability, cultural, and communication differences
Eye contact, posture, speech rate, facial expressions, and physical distance vary across people, disabilities, cultures, and situations.
Treat nonverbal behavior as information to consider rather than proof of another person's emotional state or intentions.
Question Assumptions
Community builders can ask:
- What do I know?
- What am I assuming?
- What evidence supports my conclusion?
- What information may be missing?
- Who has not yet been heard?
- How might my own role or interests affect my interpretation?
Reflection can be useful, but people should not be encouraged to reinterpret clear misconduct simply in order to reach a more positive conclusion.
2. Forgiveness Is Optional
Some people experience forgiveness as spiritually, emotionally, or relationally important.
Others do not.
Forgiveness can mean different things, including reducing a desire for retaliation, changing one's relationship to a painful event, or deciding that resentment will no longer shape one's life.
Forgiveness does not necessarily mean:
- Excusing harmful behavior
- Forgetting what happened
- Restoring trust
- Reestablishing a relationship
- Ending legal or organizational accountability
- Giving up boundaries
- No longer feeling anger, grief, or fear
People can heal, pursue justice, establish boundaries, and participate in community life without forgiving someone who harmed them.
No community program, faith leader, facilitator, employer, family member, or institution should require forgiveness as proof of healing, compassion, reconciliation, or good character.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation Are Different
A person may forgive without reconciling.
People may also negotiate, coexist, cooperate, or participate in a community process without personally forgiving one another.
Reconciliation involves decisions about relationships and social conditions. Forgiveness remains an individual choice.
3. Practice Accountability and Repair
Mercy is most useful when compassion is paired with responsibility.
Accountability may involve:
- Naming the behavior that caused harm
- Acknowledging its effects
- Accepting responsibility
- Apologizing when appropriate
- Making restitution
- Changing behavior
- Changing policies or procedures
- Establishing safeguards
- Following legal or professional requirements
An apology may be meaningful, but it does not automatically repair harm.
The person harmed determines whether an apology is meaningful to them and whether they want any future relationship.
Consequences and Mercy
Mercy should not be defined simply as avoiding punishment.
Some harmful behavior requires consequences to protect people, maintain professional standards, enforce rights, or reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
A compassionate process can still ask whether consequences are proportionate, effective, fair, and consistent with the goals of safety and accountability.
Depending on the situation, appropriate responses may include:
- Restitution
- Loss of particular responsibilities
- Supervision
- Required training
- Formal discipline
- Legal consequences
- Separation from a program or organization
- Restorative processes
Mercy and consequences are therefore not necessarily opposites.
Part II: Developing Capacities for Compassionate and Accountable Action
Reflection and Emotional Awareness
People may find it useful to notice how emotions influence their responses during conflict.
Possible practices include:
- Taking a brief pause
- Breathing slowly
- Journaling
- Prayer
- Meditation
- Walking
- Talking with someone trusted
- Professional counseling
These practices are optional.
They should not be presented as scientifically proven ways to release trauma, clear emotional pain, guarantee forgiveness, or produce merciful behavior.
Mindfulness and Contemplative Practices
Mindfulness may help some people notice thoughts, feelings, and reactions before acting on them.
Community organizations should not make meditation or contemplative exercises mandatory.
Some people – including some people with histories of trauma – may find inward-focused exercises uncomfortable.
Provide alternatives and allow people to decide whether a practice is useful to them.
Avoid Unsupported Health Claims
Compassion, kindness, social connection, and mindfulness have all been studied in relation to well-being.
However, community materials should not claim that kind behavior prevents heart attacks or strokes, boosts immune function, extends marriages, or produces other specific health effects without strong and appropriately presented evidence.
The case for treating people with compassion does not depend on proving medical benefits to the person acting compassionately.
Respond to Emotions Without Requiring Emotional Disclosure
People involved in conflict may experience anger, grief, fear, shame, frustration, numbness, or other emotions.
Facilitators can acknowledge those emotions without requiring participants to:
- Cry
- Relive traumatic experiences
- Disclose private information
- Forgive
- Empathize with the person who harmed them
- Complete a particular emotional sequence
There is no universal process through which painful emotions must be “discharged” before clear thinking or healing can occur.
Self-Forgiveness and Responsibility
People who have caused harm may struggle with guilt, shame, or regret.
Self-forgiveness can be useful when it helps a person accept responsibility without becoming permanently defined by a past action.
It should not become a way to bypass accountability.
A constructive process may include:
- Acknowledging what happened
- Understanding its impact
- Making appropriate repair
- Changing future behavior
- Accepting consequences
- Seeking professional support if needed
Boundaries Are Compatible with Mercy
Compassion does not require unlimited access to another person.
People may need boundaries around:
- Physical contact
- Conversation
- Personal information
- Time
- Money
- Home or workplace access
- Future communication
Boundaries may be stated directly.
It can be appropriate to say, for example:
“We need everyone to stop shouting so that the meeting can continue.”
Or:
“That language violates our harassment policy, and it needs to stop.”
Compassionate communication does not require avoiding clear statements about harmful behavior.
Responding to Threats or Violence
When someone threatens or attempts violence, immediate safety takes priority over dialogue, forgiveness, or relationship-building.
Community workers should follow their organization's safety procedures and seek trained assistance when needed.
Depending on the circumstances, this may involve:
- Creating distance
- Helping others leave the area
- Contacting trained security, crisis-response personnel, or emergency services
- Following established de-escalation procedures
- Avoiding unnecessary confrontation when safe to do so
Physical restraint should be used only by appropriately trained people acting within applicable policy and law.
A general community-building resource should not provide improvised physical-restraint instructions.
Listening Does Not Eliminate Accountability
It may be useful to understand the needs or circumstances associated with harmful behavior.
Understanding those circumstances does not excuse the behavior.
A person's unmet needs should not become the responsibility of the person they threatened, abused, harassed, or harmed.
Community Responsibility
Community members and institutions can contribute to conditions that reduce harm.
Depending on the issue, this may involve:
- Accessible mental-health and substance-use services
- Violence-prevention programs
- Housing
- Education
- Employment opportunities
- Anti-discrimination policies
- Effective complaint systems
- Community-based support
Shared community responsibility should not erase individual or institutional responsibility for specific harms.
Restorative Practices and Mercy
Restorative justice is one possible framework for responding to harm.
Restorative practices generally focus on:
- What happened
- Who was affected
- What responsibility exists
- What people need
- What repair is possible
- How recurrence can be reduced
Restorative justice should not be described simply as mercy replacing punishment.
It can itself involve demanding forms of accountability.
Participation should consider:
- Voluntary and informed participation
- Safety
- Power differences
- Legal rights
- The seriousness of the harm
- Accessibility
- Trained facilitation
- Follow-up
The person harmed should not be required to meet, forgive, empathize with, or reconcile with the person responsible.
Accountability and Reintegration
People who have caused harm should not automatically be defined forever by the worst thing they have done.
In appropriate circumstances, reintegration can follow accountability, behavioral change, and appropriate safeguards.
This may be especially relevant in schools, justice settings, workplaces, families, and community organizations.
Reintegration is not the same as restoring every previous role or relationship.
The safety and rights of people harmed remain important.
Mercy in Everyday Community Life
Compassionate and accountable practices can begin in everyday relationships.
Community builders can:
- Listen carefully
- Ask before assuming
- Recognize when they made a mistake
- Apologize specifically
- Make repair where possible
- Respect boundaries
- Challenge dehumanizing language
- Help people access needed resources
- Address policies that repeatedly produce harm
Balancing Care for Others with Personal Limits
Community workers may care deeply about problems that are larger than any one person's capacity to solve.
Mercy does not require continual personal sacrifice.
Sustainable community work may require:
- Boundaries
- Shared responsibility
- Adequate staffing
- Fair compensation
- Rest
- Professional support
- Realistic goals
Part III: Communication Methods
Communication methods can help people organize difficult conversations, but no technique guarantees understanding, forgiveness, reconciliation, or resolution.
Select a method according to the issue, people involved, power differences, safety concerns, time available, and desired outcome.
Active Listening
A simple active-listening process might include:
- One person explains a point.
- The listener summarizes what they understood.
- The speaker clarifies if necessary.
- The listener asks whether there is more the speaker wants understood.
- The participants change roles when appropriate.
Participants should not be expected to interpret another person's breathing, posture, facial expression, or other body language as evidence of a particular feeling.
Nonviolent Communication
Nonviolent Communication is one structured communication approach that emphasizes observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
Some people find this framework useful.
It should not be treated as the only compassionate way to communicate or as appropriate for every conflict.
In situations involving abuse, discrimination, harassment, serious misconduct, or significant power differences, formal reporting, accountability, or protective measures may be more important than facilitated interpersonal dialogue.
Facilitated Circles
Circle processes can provide a structure in which people take turns speaking and listening.
Contemporary restorative circles and other facilitated circle methods may draw inspiration from several sources.
When a practice is derived from a particular Indigenous Nation or cultural tradition, identify that tradition accurately rather than referring broadly to “Native American” or “First Nations” practices.
Do not assume that any object passed around a group automatically becomes a traditional “talking stick.”
Communities can simply use a speaking object, turn-taking object, or another locally appropriate term unless they are intentionally working within a specific cultural tradition.
Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry can help groups examine strengths, successful experiences, and possibilities for the future.
It can be useful alongside other forms of assessment.
Do not require participants to identify something positive before they are allowed to discuss harm, discrimination, failure, or dissatisfaction.
Open Space and Other Participatory Methods
Open Space, World Café, small-group discussions, deliberative forums, and other participatory approaches can help groups organize conversation.
Each approach has advantages and limitations.
Consider:
- Accessibility
- Language
- Time
- Childcare
- Transportation
- Technology
- Power differences
- How decisions will actually be made
Participatory discussion should connect with real decision-making authority whenever possible.
Cultural Traditions and Community Practices
Cultural and religious traditions can offer valuable approaches to compassion, accountability, dialogue, and repair.
Use these practices carefully.
Avoid presenting a practice from Hawaiʻi, a First Nation, a Tribal Nation, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, or another tradition as though it were a universal community-building technique.
When including a culturally specific practice:
- Identify its community or tradition accurately
- Use credible sources
- Explain its context
- Avoid claiming clinical or spiritual effects beyond what is supported
- Respect community authority over the practice
Ho'oponopono
Ho'oponopono is a Hawaiian tradition concerned with setting relationships right and addressing conflict within particular cultural and family contexts.
Popularized four-line versions circulating outside Hawaiʻi should not be presented as though they represent the entire tradition or as methods that can heal another person's memories or circumstances at a distance.
If Ho'oponopono is retained as an example, describe its Hawaiian context accurately and distinguish traditional practices from later adaptations.
Peer Support and Counseling
Peer-support practices can be valuable, but they should not be described as substitutes for mental-health treatment.
Community members experiencing serious depression, trauma, suicidality, substance-use concerns, or other mental-health needs may benefit from qualified professional support.
Mercy in Digital Communication
Online communication can support community connection while also creating challenges involving misinformation, harassment, rapid escalation, impersonation, and automated content.
Useful practices include:
- Verify information before sharing it
- Distinguish disagreement from harassment or threats
- Avoid amplifying dehumanizing content
- Correct misinformation when appropriate
- Protect privacy
- Use moderation and reporting systems when needed
Compassion does not require continuing online interaction with someone who is abusive or threatening.
Setting the Stage for Compassionate Community Processes
Before convening a difficult conversation, consider:
- Safety: Can people participate without being exposed to preventable harm?
- Accessibility: Are physical, sensory, language, communication, transportation, and childcare needs addressed?
- Power: Do some participants have authority over the employment, housing, services, legal status, education, or safety of others?
- Participation: Are the people most affected meaningfully involved?
- Purpose: Is the goal understanding, decision-making, accountability, repair, planning, or something else?
- Decision-making: Who will determine what happens after the conversation?
- Support: Do participants have access to advocates, interpreters, facilitators, or other support when needed?
Challenges and Limits of Mercy
Mercy Can Reinforce Unequal Power
The language of mercy can imply that one person possesses the power to grant another relief.
In situations involving rights, entitlements, or institutional obligations, language such as justice, fairness, accountability, or repair may be more appropriate.
Mercy Can Be Used to Avoid Accountability
Calls for compassion, understanding, or forgiveness can sometimes be used to discourage reporting or to protect a person or institution from consequences.
Community builders should ask:
- Who benefits from calling for mercy?
- Is anyone being pressured to remain silent?
- Has the harm stopped?
- Has responsibility been acknowledged?
- Has meaningful repair occurred?
Understanding Is Not Agreement
Community builders can seek to understand why harmful behavior occurred without agreeing that it was justified.
Understanding should inform accountability rather than replace it.
Mercy Should Not Require Forgiveness
People experiencing harm should not be characterized as vindictive, self-righteous, emotionally blocked, or unwilling to heal if they do not forgive.
Forgiveness remains theirs to define and choose.
Compassion Does Not Require Neutrality
Some conflicts involve violations of rights, abuse, discrimination, corruption, or clear misconduct.
Treating everyone with dignity does not require pretending that every side has equal responsibility.
Not Every Conflict Needs Reconciliation
Sometimes the appropriate outcome is:
- A firm boundary
- Separation
- Formal discipline
- Legal action
- Institutional reform
- Safe coexistence without a restored relationship
Questions for Reflection
- What does mercy mean to the people involved?
- Would another term such as compassion, accountability, repair, or restorative practice be clearer?
- Who has power in this situation?
- What rights or protections apply?
- Has the harm stopped?
- Is anyone being pressured to forgive or reconcile?
- What accountability is needed?
- What repair is possible?
- What needs to change so that the harm is less likely to recur?
- Are community members directly affected by the issue helping determine the response?
In Summary
Mercy can be a useful way to think about compassionate responses to suffering, wrongdoing, conflict, and human vulnerability.
In community work, mercy is most constructive when it operates alongside safety, rights, accountability, appropriate consequences, and meaningful repair.
Understanding matters, but understanding does not mean agreement or excuse.
Forgiveness may be deeply important to some people, but it is personal and voluntary. No one should be required to forgive in order to heal, participate in community life, receive support, or be considered compassionate.
Accountability means more than remorse. It may require acknowledgment, restitution, changed behavior, safeguards, organizational action, or formal consequences.
Restorative practices may provide useful alternatives or complements to conventional responses to harm, but they should be voluntary, appropriately facilitated, attentive to power differences, and focused on responsibility and repair rather than forgiveness.
Community builders should also be cautious when drawing practices from religious or Indigenous traditions. Cultural practices should be accurately attributed and understood in context rather than generalized or converted into universal techniques.
Reflection, mindfulness, prayer, movement, art, and other practices may help some people approach conflict more deliberately. They should remain optional and should not be presented as substitutes for professional care or as scientifically proven ways to heal trauma.
When there is an immediate threat of violence, safety comes first. Community builders should follow trained procedures rather than assuming compassionate communication alone will resolve the danger.
Finally, mercy should not make injustice harder to name. A compassionate community is not one that eliminates consequences or asks people who were harmed to soften their response. It is one that treats people with dignity while taking harm seriously, protecting those at risk, requiring responsibility, and creating meaningful opportunities for repair and change.
Contributors
Paula Maas
Teresa Cowan Jones
Editor
Bill Berkowitz