Yours Faithfully, With Grace

When we do not face reality, especially when we consider it ‘unpleasant’, we may tend to push our own suffering by unconscious but active denial on to other people and out into the word, seeing them as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. Parents who cannot tolerate their own imperfections, will criticize and alienate their children for their imperfections; one partner, blind to his own faults will notice, criticize and condemn the very same imperfections in the other.
On a larger scale, some cultures attempt to push away their own suffering by making their members all good and other people all bad. This happened in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia, and in Rwanda, and closer home the monster rears its ugly head whenever we consider any group or community as the wrong or evil ‘Other’.
Roman Catholic saint Francis de sales speak of our ‘abjections’. To love our abjections, he tells us, is to love ourselves as we are loved, in our wholeness. It is also to have compassion for ourselves, teaching us that the true place of transformation is not in our gifts but in our weaknesses. “To love our abjections is to shatter the images of self-perfection we would like to project. It is thus to enter into the mystery of loving all that is human, and from there to begin to love all humans truly.”
Maybe we are perfectly imperfect, as someone once suggested. That awareness is a grace that brings a compassionate understanding and support to work on our deficiencies. And once we understand that, then we become capable of extending more grace towards others.
Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers provide us with deep and transformative lessons, one of them being that awareness of imperfection allows us to be less judgmental of others.
Once, a story goes, a brother in the community committed a fault. A council was called to decide on what punishment was be given to him, to which the old and respected Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go. Then the elders sent someone to him, saying, “Come join us, for everyone is waiting for you.”
So he got up to join them, but carried with him on his shoulder a leaking jug filled with water. The others came out to meet out behind him from the jug said, “What is this father?” The old man said to them, “My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” When they heard that, they said no more to the brother, but forgive him.
If you acknowledge your imperfections and the imperfections of this world, work hard, and rise to the challenge to be a ware of them and change and evolve accordingly, “then you are a vehicle for the expression of God’s dynamic perfection”, writes David Aaron in his spiritual work based on his understanding of the Kabbalah, The secret life of God.
This is not about being satisfied with the mediocre or about condoning ‘evil’ or inhumanity; it is about facing reality and working with it rather than against it.
Working with ‘what is’ means to seek meaning within the absurd, peace within chaos, light within darkness, joy within suffering – without the need to deny the reality of absurdity, chaos, darkness and suffering.