This reflection was written by Principal Jesse Zink for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.

Dear colleague,

As many of us know, the province of Quebec has a strong tradition of secularism which seeks to marginalize the public displays and discussion of religion. As a prominent institution in Quebec, McGill University is also an avowedly secular institution. The values that McGill speaks about most often are those that make little reference to religion, like free enquiry or rigorous scholarship. These are important values, but they are not particularly religious.

It was surprising to me last week to read the traditional start-of-semester message sent out by McGill’s provost, Christopher Manfredi. He wrote, in part, “We are therefore called to practice compassion, grace, and care for others.” I was struck by the religious inflection of these words. Grace describes the central value of the Christian tradition! Care is about what we are called to show one another in community and which Christians have long sought to model in their relationships with one another.

But the value I was particularly struck by was the first one: compassion. Compassion is a critical word in the New Testament—and it’s also one of my favourite Greek words: splanchnizomai, which means something like to be moved in one’s gut. Just as the heart is the seat of emotion today (“moved in my heart”), the gut was in the ancient world. When compassion is used in the New Testament, it’s almost always used in reference to God, Jesus, or their parabolic stand-ins. It describes Jesus’ response when a widow whose only son has just died approaches him (Luke 7:13). It is what the Good Samaritan feels when he sees the wounded man (Luke 10:33). It is what the father of the prodigal feels when he sees his son returning home (Luke 15:20). A closely related word is mercy. Mercy is what is what Jesus offers in these stories and what he embodies above all on the cross. It is the unearned, self-giving love of God that is at the heart of the Christian gospel.

I agree with the McGill administration that we could all do with showing more compassion to one another. I hope that we can model compassion for one another in this college community in the coming year. But from my perspective, I can’t understand compassion without also understanding the ministry of Jesus Christ. I am enabled to show compassion to others when I understand the mercy God shows to me. In a challenging time, Christians have an opportunity to offer and model for a secular world a fuller, deeper, and more robust understanding of this important value. In a secular age, religion remains a vital role in grounding our common life.

For my birthday this summer, my family got me a t-shirt that says, simply, “Mercy now.” It’s a reference to one of my favourite songs, by the singer Mary Gauthier, and its lyrics describe what I hope can be an aspiration for this community in the coming year.

Yea, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow…
Every single one of us could use some mercy now

Faithfully yours,

Jesse Zink
Principal