From the Pastor
Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End
…there are no short-cuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.
Of course, naming, claiming, and loving the whole of who we are is easier said than done: honest self-examination is a well-known source of human misery! Yet the alternative is more painful still. In Erik Erikson’s scheme of adult development, he argues that if we can’t accept all that we’ve been and done, we’ll age away from “integrity” toward “despair.”
As I look around at my age-mates in late midlife and beyond, it’s not hard to witness despair and its sad consequences. Some consequences are personal, as people who try to deny their inner darkness carry resentment in their hearts and leave it in their wake. Some consequences are political, as people who fear whatever feels alien in themselves project their fear on “the alien other” — while shameless politicians cynically manipulate that fear to play the divide-and-conquer game.
But if we are willing to move through the pain of honest self-examination toward the grace of compassionate self-acceptance, the rewards are great. When we can say, “I am all of the above,” we become more at ease in our own skin, more at home on the face of this richly diverse earth, more accepting of others who are no more or less flawed than we are, and better able to live as life-givers to the end of our days.
-Parker Palmer (July 8, 2015)
Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End | The On Being Project
Blessings,
Pastor Leigh
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