About five months ago, I was loading a case of water in my car outside a drug store. It was just after noon on a sunny Monday. A young man, wielding a knife, asked for my purse and I gave it to him.
As I watched him run away I realized that my cell phone was in it, and being a banker, I started adding up the cost of replacing the purse, the phone, the prescription I just picked up, and my favorite blue wallet. I thought of the hassle of replacing my debit and credit cards and wondered why I carried so many. I started to feel ill when I thought of the gift cards I had been hoarding. Why didn’t I use them right away like Clark Howard recommends?
The police arrived on the scene, including a canine, within seconds. The police officer shared his phone but I couldn’t call anyone because except for my husband, who wasn’t answering, I knew no phone numbers. Thank goodness my keys were in my car. After an hour or so, the police, who had the suspect’s picture on high-definition video, recommended I go back to work and promised they would continue to search for him. Shortly after I returned to work, I remembered that the pearls I wore on my wedding day were in my purse. The clasp is broken and I had been postponing the errand to drop them off at the jewelers. I felt my knees begin to give and I had to sit down. I hadn’t thought this out loud, but it was in my head that all my daughters would wear my pearls at their weddings, and now the pearls were gone.
By 9 p.m. on the drive home from yoga, I was completely immersed in feeling sorry for myself. When I walked in the house, my husband said, “Your purse is on my desk.” The young man was in jail and I got everything back except $4.
That night I was exhausted but I had insomnia. Over the next few days I felt agitated. I still could not sleep, and everything seemed to rattle me. There are a lot of little (and big) things in my life that bother me, but I felt like I had all those annoyances in pots on a stove with the lids tightly affixed and everything ran pretty smoothly. Now the lids had come off. I had to be careful not to snap at my husband, my daughters, my coworkers and my dogs. I ate a lot of chocolate. My left-brained, analytical, engineer husband recommended I let this go, pointing out that I experienced minimal impact as far as armed robberies go. That comment put another pot on the stove.
By Saturday I was nowhere near normal. We went to Mass at St. Pius X Church and I walked through the Holy Door of Mercy. I remembered with a chill and an unspoken epithet that this was the Extraordinary Year of Mercy: the special year where all debts would be forgiven, property returned and prisoners set free. Fantastic, I thought. Not only am I a victim but I’m supposed to be merciful, too. I double-checked the start and end date of the jubilee year and I couldn’t find a loophole.
A few days later I had to fill out a victim impact statement for the district attorney. I tore up the lengthy first draft and wrote instead that I had minimal impact as far as armed robberies go. I explained I was Catholic and it was the Extraordinary Year of Mercy, and I asked him to show the young man some mercy.
The district attorney was quite surprised by my impact statement. He asked what I thought mercy was, and I told him I really wasn’t sure. He let me know that he represented the people in this case, not me. The young man in jail had confessed right away and was planning to plead guilty. He had no prior record, but the charge of robbery with a dangerous weapon carried a minimum sentence of 38 months, maybe longer. The judge would ask my thoughts at the sentencing hearing, he said.
This made me ill. Over three years in prison for $4? I couldn’t imagine how a kid who never had any trouble becomes an armed robber. I could not imagine what this man’s mother was going through.
Five months later at his sentencing hearing, I planned to ask the judge to be merciful. I got a little more insight when the public defender pulled me aside and explained that the young man had experienced mental health issues since he was young, and for the past several years he had been hearing voices in his head. The public defender had seen my impact statement and wondered if I would be all right if she asked the judge to use the “extraordinary mitigating circumstances” provision to give him probation instead of a prison sentence. He would be able to enter a mental health program that also helped people like him find jobs. This sounded like mercy to me.
The young man pleaded guilty and the public defender explained his circumstances to the judge. I asked the judge to use her discretion and show mercy. The judge used her discretion to put him on probation and ordered him to attend the mental health program. She told him she didn’t know if it was serendipitous or divine intervention that he chose to rob me, but my comments greatly influenced her decision. The man’s mother wept when she realized he would be coming home that day, not three years later, and her joy spread through the courtroom. Everyone – attorneys, probation officers, spectators and the bailiffs – felt this joy. It was palpable. I think I skipped the two blocks back to work.
I have always believed I am a merciful person, but maybe I was overestimating myself because it was surprisingly hard to walk the walk. I believe there was divine intervention at work, but it was at work on me. I only experienced minimal impact as far as armed robberies go, but I got to feel the tremendous energy generated by mercy and I walked out of that courtroom on air. And I learned that there is a way to get rid of all those pots on the stove.
Elizabeth Heard is a member of St. Pius X Church in Greensboro.