There is a question underneath every dispute we find ourselves in: is anyone actually right? We want the universe to settle it, to hand down a verdict, to make things fair. But the more time we spend inside a real conflict, the more we notice that fairness is not what we are being offered.
What the Preacher in Georgia Meant
Years ago I attended Victory Church in Stone Mountain, Georgia, a brick-encrusted complex with an arched glass entrance and a charismatic preacher at its helm. He delivered long, provocative sermons every Sunday. One line followed me after I left. “Don’t pray for what is fair. Pray for what is merciful.”
I didn’t understand it. Why wouldn’t God want life to be fair? It took nearly twenty years for the answer to arrive, and it arrived through the worst kind of teacher: a prolonged and difficult litigation with my name on it.
That line is the crux of the whole question about right and wrong. We assume that if morality is real, the universe should enforce it. We expect a cosmic parent distributing treats to the good and consequences to the bad. That is not how it works, and the gap between what we expect and what we get is where most of our suffering lives.
We Live in a Litigious Culture
It is a truth that defines modern life. Most of us have a general awareness that there is an elasticity in our judicial system, an elasticity that allows for a kind of petty warfare that, once started, can escalate exponentially. We have watched the legal spectacles of Hollywood stars and government officials play out messily in the public square.
But most people meet litigation in smaller ways. Property squabbles. Accident disputes. Most commonly, divorce, where attorneys weaponize confidences into interpersonal “shock and awe” campaigns.
Inside these disputes, “success” seems to depend on more than the law and the facts. The outcome is often determined by warrior-lawyers rather than by who was right. This is the moment when many of us conclude that morality must be relative. If the courts don’t reward the truth, we reason, then there is no truth to reward. But that conclusion mistakes the system for the whole.
The Real Loss Is Not the Money
We think litigation is about money: how much you must pay, how much you can lose. That is not the wound. The real loss is around identity. Will people think that I’m a bad person? Will I be outcast inside of my social groups or my family?
This is why disputes over right and wrong cut so deep. We are not defending a position. We are defending who we take ourselves to be. When someone attacks us with six litigations, as one man did to me, the terror is not financial. It is the possibility of losing every cherished picture of ourselves.
Healing can alleviate that suffering as we lose those identities one by one. And here is the strange mercy of it. We can lose every single identity except the one that matters: our identity as a soul. Everything else can be stripped away and the thing underneath is untouched.
Not Punished, but Guided
The universe is not designed to deliver fairness. It is designed to deliver lessons that help us wake up to greater levels of love. This is a different claim than moral relativism, and a different claim than cosmic justice.
Right and wrong are real. We have blind spots, and the point of a conflict is to understand what they are so that we can see more clearly next time. That is not relative. That is the specific work of owning our own shadow, of looking at what we contributed rather than only at what was done to us.
But when we fall down and fail, we are not punished. We are guided. Mercy is an aspect of love. It is what the Divine shows us in the exact moment we expect to be judged. So morality is real, and the response to our failures within it is not the scoreboard we imagined. It is guidance.
The Woman Who Showed Mercy
I once worked with a woman who had been falsely accused. Everything in her wanted the record corrected, the accusers named, the fairness delivered. She found liberation instead by showing mercy to all those who had falsely accused her.
That is not the same as saying the accusations were fine, or that right and wrong dissolved. She knew exactly what was true. She simply stopped waiting for the universe to punish the people who had wronged her, and in that release she was free.
I found the same thing with the man who attacked me. I could show mercy to him and find my peace, as God shows mercy on all of us for our human imperfection. We are all human, all so imperfect. That imperfection is precisely why we pray for mercy and not for what is fair. If we got what was fair, none of us would be left standing.
The Quiet Truth
Right and wrong are real. Our blind spots are real. What we did and did not do is real, and worth understanding so we see more clearly next time. Morality is not the fiction that a rigged courtroom tempts us to believe it is.
What is not real is the expectation that the universe will keep an even ledger and pay us out in fairness. It will not. It offers something harder and more useful: lessons, and mercy for the times we fail them. I finally understood the Initiation of litigation. It was about the spiritual outcome, not the legal one. I had owned my shadow. I had learned what was available for me to learn. I was okay. My family was okay. My marriage was stronger than ever. That is what mercy looks like when we stop demanding fairness and let ourselves be guided instead.
In Everything We Trust, Sylvia Solit
