New Years Intention 2014: "Love your neighbor as yourself".

"Love your neighbor as yourself". 

I have long been intrigued by this verse.  While popular, I often find these words to be misunderstood.  I hear people use these words to compel their loved ones to be kind, compassionate, and generous to others.  And while I wholeheartedly agree with this intention, I've witnessed many people live out these words to the neglect of themselves.  I've heard people say, "Scripture tells me to love my neighbor... it says nothing about loving myself".  I beg to differ.

The verse says: "love your neighbor as yourself", the imperative word here being "as".  The long form of this phrase would be "love your neighbor as you love yourself".  This means that in order to be kind, compassionate, and generous to our neighbor, we must first be these things to ourselves.  Think about it.  If you are invited to love someone as you love yourself this means that if you dislike yourself you are to dislike that someone, if you are cruel to yourself, then you are to be cruel to that someone.  Conversely, if you cherish yourself then to others you are invited to do likewise.  Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  This verse assumes that we love ourselves, which I find to be a rather large assumption.

I know a lot of people who are good at judging themselves.  I know people who criticize themselves or call themselves names.  I even know people who appear pretty self-satisfied on the outside but are masking an extremely low sense of self-worth on the inside.  I do know some people who kind of like themselves and are generally okay with themselves, but I know only a few people who really seem to accept and love their full selves, flaws and all.  

My yoga instructor this evening highlighted this idea when he admonished us to spend 2014 putting ourselves first, to move ourselves to "the top of the list" as he put it.  This isn't because he is secretly trying to breed narcissists.  It's because he knows deeply that if we are to have the energy, empathy, strength and passion that we so want to put back into the world we must first give it to ourselves.  We must nurture ourselves in order to nurture our loved ones... and our neighbors.  He also reflected that unless we love ourselves unconditionally, we cannot freely or aptly love others. 

I don't know what it looks like for you to practice loving yourself, or practice self-cherishing as I like to call it.  Perhaps it starts by forgiving yourself when you are sometimes impatient, or asking yourself what you really want to do on a Friday night, or taking 30min every day to do one thing that you deeply enjoy.  Whatever it may be, I encourage you to give yourself permission to do it and not apologize for it.

I think this world needs more people who aren't afraid of caring for themselves.  The people I know who practice taking care of themselves are some of the most genuine, generous, and delightful people I have been blessed to come into contact with.  Maybe it's because learning how to love themselves opened them up to loving others, including me, wholeheartedly.

As for me, what do I want for 2014?  How am I going to practice self-cherishing?  I'm going to start with trying to lay down any residual guilt for being who I am, valuing what I value, or wanting what I want.  And then, I'm going to try to be intentional about making 2014 about creativity, courage, and compassion.  Why those three things, you may ask. 

Simply because I want to.         

Souls, Bodies, Spaces

As I ride home from my Uncle Paul’s funeral, I can’t help but think about what a strange week it has been.  It has been a week full of travel, grief, reconnection, and memories.   Walking into the church for the funeral, I was flooded with so many memories.  This is the space where we had first my grandma’s and then my grandpa’s funeral.  This is the space where my Goddaughter had first her Baptism and then her First Communion.  This is the space where many cousins got married. 

It’s weird the ties we have to spaces.  A friend once asked me where my holy ground is or has been in my life.  I considered how in high-school my parish was my sanctuary.  It was a safe place to be; a place and a community in which to bring my fears, my sorrows, my hopes.  Circle R Ranch, my camp, was once such a place of belonging, of safety.  I remember often sitting on the fence, watching the fog roll in, breathing in the cool, crisp air, feeling settled and grounded.  As I have gotten older, St. Ben’s, Haiti, Russell-Glover Farm and the Boundary Waters have all been my own personal holy ground.  Mostly, however, I think about home.

My parents’ home has been my sanctuary for as long as I can remember.  I never feel lost there.  Whether I’m living there or just visiting, somehow being home settles me… it brings me peace, comfort, a sense of release.  This could possibly be my last season of living there and as the time of me leaving approaches I realize it is accompanied by a tinge of sadness.  As my parents and I get older, it dawns on me from time to time that one day our home will no longer be our home.  We’ll say good-bye to this space.  I expect that saying good-bye to this piece of holy ground will bring as much grief and loss as saying good-bye to a body.

 

It is difficult saying good-bye to the body of someone you love; even when you trust and believe that their spirit lingers and lives on.  We will never again see that body smile or move.  We won’t feel the warmth of that body’s embrace.   We won’t hear that body speak.  The spirit will live on and yet somehow the body will no longer be ours. 

We mournfully say good-bye to Paul’s body and hopefully trust that his soul remains at peace.    

I’m glad that I am here and that I got to accompany my mom on this journey.  There is sadness, regret, and fear here, but there is mostly love.  Love of siblings, parents, children, cousins, grandparents and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles. 

Love of souls, of bodies, of spaces.     

We are Worthy

In Tattoos on the Heart, Gregory Boyle writes:

       Mother Teresa told a roomful of lepers once how loved by God
       they were and a “gift to the rest of  us.”  Interrupting her, an old
       leper raised his hand, and she calls on him. “Could you repeat that
       again?  It did me good. So, would you mind… just saying it again.”

       Franciscan Richard Rohr writes that “the Lord comes to us
       disguised as ourselves.”

       We’ve come to believe that we grow into this. The only thing we
       know about Jesus “growing up” is that he “grew in age, wisdom
       and favor with God.” But do we really grow in favor with God?
       Did Jesus become increasingly more favorable to God, or did he
       just discover, over time, that he was wholly favorable?


Did Jesus just discover over time that he was wholly favorable? I think so.  I think Jesus was always wholly favorable and growing in favor was merely his own growing in recognition of this. Additionally, if God comes to us disguised as ourselves, this means that we are all wholly favorable, just as we are, from the day we are born until the day we die.

When I really think about it, this has to be true. Otherwise there would be a way to determine when you had reached the point of true worthiness. What would that look like? I will be worthy when I get the right job? Or when my parents or my spouse is happy with me? I will be enough when I graduate from school or I publish my first book? What’s the test? When do we get there? Or worse yet, there is the idea of assuming my own unworthiness based on the bad things happening in my life: I must deserve this illness or it wouldn’t be happening to me; this tragedy must be some sort of karma; if I were good enough, my parents wouldn’t be divorcing or my loved one wouldn’t be dying.

It seems to me that there isn’t a way to determine the point in our lives when we miraculously and finally reach the place of being enough, of being worthy… worthy of love, belonging, peace, joy, dignity. So, we either always are, have been, and will be worthy, or we aren’t and never will be. Somehow, with every fiber of my being, I just know it’s the first: each of us, with all of our imperfections, is born and remains wholly favorable, wholly worthy, no matter what.

I know this and yet, it’s so difficult for me to feel it sometimes. I am an expert at not feeling good enough, as if I have to do more so that people will like me, accept me, love me. I have to be more than me, to be enough for others.  Even today, I don’t have all of the answers on how to combat this. The almost unconscious idea that I must do something to grow in favor with God and others is so ingrained in me, that I struggle against it, despite intellectually knowing it’s not true.

I do know that sometimes, like the leper, I hold on to those moments from others when the sun shines through and I remember “I am loved. I am a gift” and I too say, “could you repeat that again? It did me good”.

What I am also realizing is that sometimes these moments from others come less than I need or want. What I am working on is saying those things to myself. Countless times over just this past week I have caught myself amidst a frenzy of one sort or another, I have stopped, taken a deep breath and said, “I am worthy”. I am beginning to stop the voices inside of me that say: do more, be more, be kinder, work harder, don’t be stupid. I am beginning to replace them with: You are enough, you are worthy, trust yourself, be kind to yourself.

I am at the beginning of my journey of discovering that I am wholly favorable: that there is nothing I can do to make God love me more or less. Since I have just begun, I can’t really say much about what affect it has had on me, although I am confident it will be pretty huge, but I do want to invite you to take the journey with me. I want to invite you too to remember that you are incredibly loved, incredibly worthy, incredibly whole, and incredibly enough, just as you are on this day, and every day of your life.

Together I hope and pray that we will grow in the knowledge that we have eternally been wholly favorable in God’s eyes. May we be reminders to others and to ourselves that we are worthy, that we are gifted and loved unconditionally. May we each lay down our shame and walk into life, gratitude, and joy.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Recently some friends of mine and myself have been struggling with uncertainty.  We have been entertaining the big life questions: how do you know what to do? where to live? who to be in relationship with? 

It seems to be a pretty common, human experience to feel a sense of importance about living this one life we have been given in a way that is meaningful.. that does our time here justice.  And the pressure, the insane fear that comes with that , is the idea that we might somehow mess it up.. we might make a mistake.. we might misuse our opportunity.  Robert Frost says: “two paths diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”.

But what if there are not merely two paths, but three, or six, or a dozen?  What if they are all more or less untraveled (they are surely untraveled by us), then how do we choose?  I think this fear of making a mistake, of choosing wrong, runs deep within our souls.  It can paralyze us into not choosing anything.

I’m not sure how many of you will relate to this, but when I was younger, we had these books called Choose Your Own Adventures.  How these books worked is that at every crossroads the main character came to, you as the reader got to choose what you wanted that character to do: to follow the bad guy or to go home? To take the bus or get in the cab with the stranger?  To go on the date or hang out with a friend? The books could end in a myriad of ways depending on the choices that you, the reader, made.  In all honesty, the amazing thing about Choose Your Own Adventures was that you could cheat…. you could read ahead, figure out if the path you were going to choose would lead to happiness or disappointment, abundance or loss, death or life, and you could choose accordingly.  Maybe no one else did that, but I remember acutely reading ahead to ensure that the path I was choosing didn’t lead to destruction before I settled on any choice.

And here is the difficult thing about being human: life is not a Choose Your Own Adventure book, at least not in this sense.  Sure, we get to choose our own adventure, each and every day.  However, we don’t get the luxury of reading ahead.  We can’t predict, we can’t know, we can’t cheat…. we can’t verify that this or that treatment, or career, or spouse, is going to lead to life and joy or death and despair.  We don’t have the comfort of knowing.  So, all we are left with is taking all the information we have, taking our emotions and our insights, and making a guess.. choosing the adventure that feels the most right, that feels hopeful, that feels best at that particular moment. 

Sometimes our choice works out.  Sometime, instead, the result is more painful than we could have every imagined.

Amidst this realization, amidst the discomfort of living in certainty, I have been searching for a silver lining.. for some glimpse of hope.  All that I can come up with is this: the knowledge that we are not alone in this.

We are not the only person to ever be terrified of making a mistake, of messing up our one, precious life.  I am not the only person to be scared to my wits that I might marry the wrong person.. just as others are not the only ones to be fearful of going to the wrong college, or moving to the wrong state, or choosing the wrong career, or of turning off life support for someone they love.  Uncertainty, the helplessness that comes from not being able to know the consequences of choosing or own adventure ahead of time, is stifling, uncomfortable, excruciating at times. 

The comfort is that we are not alone.  That this is what it means to be human. 

As humans I do not think we are promised that this life is easy.  I do think, however, that we are blessed in the truth that we are not alone, that we are accompanied on this journey, however uncertain it may be.  

Today, perhaps we can move closer towards trusting that all will be well, we will be well, no matter what choices we make.  

Perhaps we can rest in the certainty that amidst our uncertainty, we are held lovingly, completely, eternally, just as we are.    

Forgiveness

Yesterday my supervisor told me, “forgiveness is letting go of wanting to re-write the past”.


This is SO true and SO difficult. To me it correlates with the phrase, “If I had known then what I know now…” Then, I would have been more compassionate. Then, I would have done things differently. Then, I would have let this person go sooner or held on to that one longer. Then, I would have moved or stayed, quit or kept going. The list goes on and on. Today I am wondering how helpful this “If…., then…” game really is.

It seems as if our gut reaction sometimes is to punish ourselves for not knowing things that we realistically only could have learned through experience. We blame ourselves for not having the wisdom and forethought in youth or adulthood that can only come with time. We get angry at ourselves, for what? For being human? How ridiculous that seems when said aloud.

And yet, I surely am not immune to berating myself for past imperfections, failures in judgment, or even for good decisions made with honest intention that simply turned out bad anyway. So, what does it mean to truly let “go of wanting to re-write the past”? How do we accept what has been and move towards forgiveness of ourselves and others? Further still, how do we learn not merely to accept the past but to bless it, to be thankful for it?

For me this looks like appreciating the wisdom, empathy, and patience that I am sometimes able to practice now, instead of dwelling on the times when I have not been so grounded in the past. For me it looks like cherishing the 21yr old scared, guilt-ridden, passive version of myself who was really doing the best she knew how to do at the time, instead of blaming her for not doing better. In order to bless my past, I must be grateful for the authentic, kind, purposeful intention with which it was carried out.

In order to re-write my past, I would have to re-write experiences that have taught me priceless lessons. In re-writing the past, everything I know and love and fear about my life at this moment, in this place, on this day, would be up for grabs. Would I be sitting here, in this office, with the sun beating on my back, and a cup of tea by my side? Who knows? In order to re-write my past I would have to forego my present. And my present, despite its’ imperfections, is beautiful and peaceful and everything I need and want right now. Not only is forgiveness letting go of wanting to re-write the past, but forgiveness is also accepting, blessing, and celebrating the present.

So, on this day, I choose to celebrate my past. I celebrate my present. I celebrate my future and all that it will be, whatever that is.

Hachi

Recently I watched the movie Hachi with my mom.  Hachi is based on the story of Hachi, a dog who lived in Japan in the 1920’s.  The story goes that Hachi as a puppy got lost at a train station where a Professor found him and took him home to provide him shelter for the evening.  When after several days no one claimed Hachi, the Professor’s wife agreed to allow the Professor to keep him.  There began a very unique relationship between man and dog.  Every day, Hachi would walk the Professor to the train station where he would board the train to go to work.  Hachi would go home during the day and when evening came and the Professor stepped off of the train to return home, there Hachi would be again waiting for him. 

One morning, Hachi walked the Professor to work as usual.  That sad day, however, the Professor had a heart attack, died and never returned.  Hachi waited patiently at the train station until late in the evening when finally someone came to retrieve him.  Over the next few days, Hachi escaped from his new home several times to return to the train station.  Finally, his new owners let him go.  The story goes that for the next nine years, Hachi waited every day at the train station for the Professor to return.  The passengers and employees of the station got to know Hachi and fed him and cared for him so that he could simply wait.  Eventually, Hachi died at the train station still waiting for the Professor.  Today there sits at that station in Japan a stone statue of Hachi. 

After watching the movie, I started thinking about who in my life would wait for me.. every day without fail.. to return, to come home.  Who in my life would sacrifice all other activities, places, people, needs, to simply sit and watch and wait for me.  That’s when I started thinking about God.

I realized that God is always waiting for me to come home… not necessarily simply in the eternal sense, not just when I die.. but that God is waiting for me to return to God’s side, daily… perhaps, minute by minute.  When I step away from the person I want to be..  when I struggle and question and doubt… when I fight and isolate…  when I feel all alone.. when I am joyful and grateful…  at all those times and many more, my Creator.. my loyal companion is simply waiting for me to return.  And God waits with the non-judgmental love and compassion of Hachi….  God waits not simply to judge us once we walk through those train station doors.. to ask us where we’ve been…  no, my God waits simply in order to rejoice at my homecoming.       

I believe this may be true for us all… no matter what we are experiencing this day, how hard life might seem, how truly alone we might feel, what if we could imagine and truly believe that around every corner there was an invisible Hachi just waiting to remind us that we are loved, we are valuable, we are enough, we are home.  

What if we could trust that the Universe would never abandon us and never give up on us.  

The Trees Today

Today I was asked to respond to this question:

What is your experience of God and how is it shaping your theology?

Here are my thoughts:

 

            As I sit in this coffee shop, I look out the window next to me to see a small bit of untamed land; a small piece of natural, quiet, beauty amidst the otherwise busy and commercialized Hennepin Avenue.  The trees there today look still and steady, claiming their space.  The leaves are vibrant: piercing flashes of red, orange, yellow and green on a backdrop of grays and browns.  I can’t really explain how such brilliant, lively, lovely color speaks to me of God, but it does.

            My experience of God is not only like those trees but it is those trees.  God is alive and present in all that is still and steady.. in my breath.. in this warm, unassuming mocha.. in the people in my life who love me through my faults.. in the voice inside of me that is also constant and claiming its’ space. 

            God is also alive in flashes of color.. in beauty.. in easy laughter… in a dog who welcomes me daily.. a home that exudes safety and confidence… in big, real hugs from children whom I love and trust.. in all the people and places that show up in my life in often surprising ways to teach me and remind me about change, vibrancy, honesty, mystery, joy, hope, beauty, life, and love. 

            Yes, perhaps my entire experience of God, the Universe, can be summed up in my experience of these trees, this mocha and this couch on this day.

            This awareness has and continues to shape my theology immensely.  Just as no one can claim to own these trees.. to have the right to them.. to possess them fully and uniquely.. so it is with God.  No one person, group, community, or religion can fully and exclusively own, express, know, or possess, God.  God leaves God’s self, open to be witnessed by all at all times.  In the same, God doesn’t demand our attention… God doesn’t debate for it or advertise…  God doesn’t fail to exist just because we failed to notice or respond.. God simply is. 

            God invites.  And the invitation is always open, at all times, in all places, to all people.  It is an invitation to be united to God, to make a connection, to glimpse and be grounded in the awe-inspiring beauty that God is.. and hence that we are too.