Something I wrote at some forgotten occasion and time about my sense of inadequacies:
Since childhood my imagination has been overstretched,
dragged down by the weighted melancholy of ten thousand wretched little sins
and darkened by the graves of a multitude of irreparable failures.
No grand failings, only contemptible ones.
Sins can be forgiven, but what remedy can undo failure?
Failure of the poorly finished, the unfinished, the misguided, the foolish;
Failure of too much or too little insight, of too great or too little effort;
each failure leaving its residue of guilt clinging to my soul
long after the deed itself had slipped from memory,
while others refuse to be forgotten,
jabbing my conscience with fairy tale endings to stories now beyond recovery.
Some people stumble grandly and suddenly, reaping admiration and sympathy.
But my dreams have died quietly by slow betrayal,
the bright morning of anticipation shriveled by delay to the wilting burden of duty,
and duty sinking into the shame of good done too late or left undone.
Even good begins to stink if it lies too long unfinished.
Dream upon dream turned moldy and abandoned,
stacked one on another like corpses on a lost battlefield,
grand hopes that kept at bay my sense of worthlessness,
finally unmasked by time’s ruthlessness.
A martial arts student went to his teacher and said earnestly, “I am devoted to studying your martial system. How long will it take me to master it.” The teacher’s reply was casual, “Ten years.” Impatiently, the student answered, “But I want to master it faster than that. I will work very hard. I will practice everyday, ten or more hours a day if I have to. How long will it take then?” The teacher thought for a moment, “20 years.”
Right now, at this very moment, I feel at peace. It is a precarious feeling. I’m fairly sure it won’t last long, but I am okay with that. I can savor it for what it is.
“Grace is that force that infuses our lives, that keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned and gratuitous love; the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you; grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there. Everything feels crazy, but on small patches of earth all over, I can see just as much messy grace as ever… It meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.’” Anne Lamont (from “Plan B”)
My wife and I were watching the local news last night, and I commented, “I like that guy [the commentator]. He’s nice. I wish I were nice like him.” He reminds me of the folks on the Today Show–you feel safe with them. You are sure they would never say or think anything mean about you. I like nice people. I want to be with them. I need them in my life in a big way. I was drawn to my best friend in college and later my first and last girlfriend, Kimberly, primarily because they were nice.
I want to be like these people, to be sweet and safe, and deep down I feel ashamed and guilty that I am not like them. It is not who I am. I am not a nice person. If someone asked my friends and acquaintances for a one word description of me, “nice” would simply not occur to them as a possibility. I’m not trashing myself–I think I do have some good attributes, and these same friends might say that I am intelligent or genuine or determined. The opposite of nice is not necessarily mean. I have something really important to contribute to others, something that nice people usually don’t have, namely challenge. And challenge often makes people feel uncomfortable and perhaps unsafe, but it’s hard to grow personally or relationally without some challenge. I am very, very grateful for those folks who are naturally sweet and gentle from birth, by personality. I am not one of them. So I need to learn to accept myself for who I am and not shame myself for who I am not. I want to grow more gentle and patient, empathetic and accepting, but I will never be Mr. Rogers. I don’t know that I would like a world full of only nice people. Still, I struggle often with the shame of not being soft and safe and find it hard to accept myself for who I am and who I was designed to be. My eyes fill up with tears just thinking about it.
What a sad thing not to be who you wish you were, and who, at some deep level, you feel you should be. I can imagine nice people feeling ashamed that they don’t have the gumption or courage or whatever it is they see and covet in me. My heart goes out to each of you who, like me, feel ashamed of who you are even at your best, who struggle desperately to be someone he or she is not. May we learn to delight in others’ gifts without it sparking a sense of our own inadequacy.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
—that is to say, grace—
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.
–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
[thanks to my cousin, Em]
“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of invisible and visible winged seeds, so the stream of time brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them.” –Thomas Merton
I would be interested to hear your thoughts and feelings about this quote.
After my last post, I thought I would pick an excerpt from my book to share:
When I think that grace leads to sin, I have been deluded into a common misunderstanding that confuses grace for tolerance or permissiveness. Such laxity is the opposite of grace, because grace is the embodiment of care and concern. If a wife doesn’t care when her husband comes home, or if he comes home, doesn’t give a rip if he gets drunk or beats the kids, we should not call her gracious, but indifferent, cold, uncaring. If her husband says, “Mind if I leave for a month with my secretary?” and his wife answers, “Whatever,” then sin is certainly being encouraged, but not by grace. That woman is the epitome of ungrace. “Whatever” is freedom offered from a heart empty of love. “Sure, go anywhere. Go to hell for all I care.”
Freedom which is the result of an uncaring relationship loses all its glory, its joy and celebration, its power, its benefit. Such freedom is a terrible burden–a freedom from the concern of anyone but myself, absolutely alone in the universe. Relationship demands some restriction of freedom. It is impossible without this, for if I alone am the single consideration in every choice I make, relationship ceases to exist. Then others simply become my environment. Grace is not laxity, but love.
I’m not very good at grace, either receiving it or giving it. My wife and I took the last name “Grace,” because we wanted it to be the foundation of our personal lives and relationships–but it will always be more of a goal than a descriptor. Some months back, I read some excerpts from my self-published book “Overwhelmed by Grace” that lay untouched for several years. I authored it while restructuring my whole worldview, which had been dashed to bits by a tidalwave of truth. Grace was still fairly theoretical and cognitive for me at that time… it had not sifted down into my way of being and perceiving and sharing. In retrospect, my book on grace seems to be more stark and challenging than gracious in presentation, revealing the battle I was waging inside myself. I have grown into grace so much more since then, and a great deal of the credit goes to my wife, Kimberly, but grace still struggles to gain ascendance in my soul. It is such a very long and arduous journey, and progress seems so slow. I lose patience and want to force myself to grow faster, but grace has its own pace and rhythm and cannot be hurried without tainting its nature. Patience with myself (and with God) is one of the toughest lessons of grace to embrace, especially in the face of others’ impatience. In spite of its reputation, grace has not come easy for me–not easy, but richly rewarding. So I am deeply grateful for every bit that has found its way into my life.
“Our suffering itself may become a form of prayer, if we can learn to let submission and love, even praise, ascend to God through it. It is a wonderful and awesome thing when in the grip of severe pain or sorrow to look up into the face of God and say: “I bring You this–now; accept it for the sake of the Lord Jesus.” It may not be the sacrifice we would choose to bring, but if pain is what God has given us, and pain is all we have, we may offer it up to Him as a sacrifice of praise and He will both accept it and hallow it. Such an offering may be one of the purest forms of worship known to the spirit of man.” Margaret Clarkson
Janathan Grace Reflections 