Me 205parts of my body are involved, such as hands, feet, bones, and muscles. All
of these body parts have direct connections to my brain and feed my mind
with information. It takes a lot of mental effort to suppress all of these
memories. Third, my body „sticks‟ together. My mind may fall apart, but
as long as I am physically alive, my body stays in one piece. Therefore, the
many memories associated with my body also tend to remain connected.
So how do I escape feelings of guilt? I suggest that, as usual, I often
take the easy way out. If Mercy identification can be used to make me feel
better, why not use it, all the more, when me feels bad? By identifying
with something good, I can pull my attention away from what is bad. As
the marketing experts might say: “Is your life boring? Are you getting
nowhere fast? Are you plagued with guilt and uncertainty? Add zzzzzip to
your life with Mercy identification!”
Suppose, for example, that I am stuck in the futility of a useless job. I
can escape my sense of failure by identifying with a professional game of
sports in which the rules are clear, the progress is certain, the results are
final, and the athletes are talented and skilled. Or, suppose that my image
of God is that of a Supreme Being sitting in heaven, glaring at me, and
plaguing me with thunderbolts of destruction. As an antidote, I can go to a
church and identify with Mercy experiences of singing about a God who
loves me and cares for me, and join my me to mental Mercy images of
goodwill and acceptance conjured up by the words of some charismatic
and caring preacher.
If me could be compared to a room, then guilt is like a stain on the
carpet or a tear in the sofa, and Mercy identification is like the magic wand
which waves it away. If the sofa is wrecked, I point the wand, invoke the
spell of identification, and the sofa
is gone. If the carpet offends me,
another wave of the wand suffices
to remove it from view. If reality
unkindly bumps me up against
some of the „disappeared‟ furniture,
then I pull out the wand and—zap,
it is gone again.
For some of us, identification is
the main way in which we remove feelings of guilt, and our mental wands
of magical disappearing are well worn. However, Mercy thought is
associative, and teleported mental „furniture‟ has a way of returning at
inopportune moments—just when we don‟t want to stumble across it.
Some of us have such problems with reappearing mental furnishings that
we hardly dare to feel for fear of bumping our mental shins on the
protruding edges of some undesirable inner Mercy experience which has
decided to come back for a visit.