Fifteen years after my first blog on mercy, I look back on what began then as an inner search for gentleness. The world has changed since, and so have I. While writing the story of my family and reading Knielen op een bed violen (Kneeling on a Bed of Violets, English edition: In my Father’s Garden) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, I began to see that the question of mercy is not only an inner one but also a social and moral one. What does it mean to remain faithful to the voice of the heart in a time when religion, power, and fear so easily become entangled? This text is a continuation of my earlier reflection — written from the same source, but with today’s eyes.
Introduction
In April 2010, I wrote about mercy in the spirit of Rumi — as a living reality revealed through the vulnerability of existence. That text arose during an online retreat, at a time when I was learning to listen to the quiet softness beneath my own confusion. Back then, my attention was turned inward: learning to trust a source of tenderness that lifted me up again and again, even when I had lost all sense of direction.
Many years later, I began working on the story of my mother’s and my father’s families. While writing, some relatives referred to In my father’s garden as a kind of mirror of what our family had also experienced — a shared legacy of religious indoctrination, of faith that had become too heavy, too strict, leaving little room for the human heart. I took the book with me on holiday and read it in one sitting. It touched something that had long been dormant: the tension between faith and freedom, between surrender and the fear of being lost.
From there, my interest grew in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who wrote The Cost of Discipleshipduring the dark years of Nazism. His words resonated with what I had encountered in my family story: the realization that faith, when severed from inner truth, can wound the soul instead of healing it. Bonhoeffer wrote at a time when institutional religion no longer testified to the living spirit but had been hollowed out, turned into an instrument of fear and control. He became a threat to authoritarian powers who sought to use religious sentiment to spread their ideology and poison the soul of the people.
This misuse of religion is not confined to Christianity alone. It can appear in Judaism, in Islam — anywhere the living relationship with the Divine is replaced by obedience to a system. That is why Bonhoeffer’s understanding of discipleship moved me so deeply: he did not see it as rule-keeping, but as a life rooted in the truth of the heart.
In this sense, I also found an echo in the words of Shams of Tabriz, Rumi’s teacher, who spoke of taʿat — obedience — not as outward submission, but as the inner service of the heart:
Freedom from the self What the Messenger sought through his obedience and practice was dissolution in the Self. That practice is the practice of the heart; that service is the service of the heart; that servanthood is the servanthood of the heart; thus you dissolve into your Beloved. Knowing that not everyone can walk the path of true practice, that such dissolution is not within everyone’s reach, he prescribed the five prayers, the thirty days of fasting, and the rituals of pilgrimage, so that they would lack nothing, could distinguish themselves from others, and perhaps catch a glimpse of that dissolution. How could hunger make sense otherwise to one who serves God? How could the outer laws of faith make sense otherwise as worship? (Maqalat II, 14:22–24, 15:1–4)
Just as Shams speaks of obedience as an act of the heart, Bonhoeffer calls for a form of discipleship that is not driven by fear or convention but by love and truth. Both point toward a freedom that arises not from resistance to the Divine, but from surrender to the living heart of faith itself.
And perhaps that is the next step on the path of mercy: not only to be touched by gentleness, but to learn to act from that same source — in a world where power, fear, and ideology still threaten to estrange people from their own souls.
(Afterword) The questions that surfaced while writing my family story — about faith, freedom, and the legacy of obedience — continue to live in me. In that sense, this reflection runs parallel not only to my earlier blog, but also to the book I am writing now: a book about how the soul, across generations and creeds, keeps seeking its own path toward truth and mercy.
