55 Thoughts for English Teachers

“For some students, you are their only light.”

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Mercy

I was thinking about an email note that someone sent to me when I began teaching, with a link to a story about a professor who was well known at the university for practicing mercy. I came across this passage from William Barclay’s Daily Study Bible commentary on Matthew (retrieved from here) when I was searching for this email. I know it’s religious, but the end of the semester requires some thinking about mercy, I think:

“It does not mean only to sympathize with a person in the popular sense of the term; it does not mean simply to feel sorry for some in trouble. Chesedh [sic], mercy, means the ability to get right inside the other person’s skin until we can see things with his eyes, think things with his mind, and feel things with his feelings.

Clearly this is much more than an emotional wave of pity; clearly this demands a quite deliberate effort of the mind and of the will. It denotes a sympathy which is not given, as it were, from outside, but which comes from a deliberate identification with the other person, until we see things as he sees them, and feel things as he feels them. This is sympathy in the literal sense of the word. Sympathy is derived from two Greek words, syn which means together with, and paschein which means to experience or to suffer. Sympathy means experiencing things together with the other person, literally going through what he is going through” (103).