This talk was given by Fr. Pocetto at the 2004 Courage Women's Retreat
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
AND SELF-ACCEPTANCE
OR
A
SPIRITUALITY FOR THE IMPERFECT
"We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures. We are the sum of the
love of God and of his son, our Lord Jesus Christ." (John Paul II).
Sr. Thea Bowman described spirituality as "God awareness, self-awareness and other awareness." Awareness of God comes through an awareness of others. This is what a prisoner in a Siberian concentration prison camp learned. “I sought my God, and he withdrew from me; I sought my soul, and I did not find it; I sought my brother [sister], and I found all three” (L. Boros, Meeting God in Man, p. 68). It is especially a spirituality of communion that brings about God awareness , other awareness and self-awareness. The more we become aware of our true selves, the more we come to see our shortcomings and imperfections. This should lead not to discouragement but to an awareness of how much we need God in our lives. And we can't find God in our lives unless we become aware of others.
Perfection
- A 'Turn-Off'
Ordinarily, the word ‘perfectionist’ does not have a favorable connotation in our language because it conjures up for us a person who appears to be always dissatisfied and impatient with himself/herself and many times with others who do not measure up to his/her impossible standards. There is no doubt that perfectionists, at times, have given humankind a legacy of great achievements in many fields, especially in literature and the arts, and have enriched us all but usually at a very great price to themselves and those who work with them or are close to them. Perfectionists carry the image or images of an ideal that is never realizable in this life. We certainly admire their striving, their relentless dedication, their inexhaustible effort but not their basic discontent and dissatisfaction with themselves and with others.
It is their
discontent and their dissatisfaction that turn us off.
Since the very idea of perfection was a turn-off,
St. Francis de Sales tried to present the pursuit of holiness in such a
way that it would be a "turn-on" for everyone, but especially for lay
people, who considered it to be simply out of their reach and frankly
unattractive and unappealing - particularly the distorted notions of holiness that were
floating around in his day and exist in various forms in our own day.
This is why his stated purpose in the first part of the Introduction
to a Devout Life is to turn the
simple desire for holiness into a firm resolution by making it attractive and
realizable. He envisions perfection
as consisting in struggling against our imperfections. Here's what he says in
one of the opening chapters of this spiritual classic:
The
work of purging the soul neither can nor should end except with our life itself.
[Says elsewhere that we reach perfection about 15 minutes after we die].
We must not be disturbed at our imperfections, since for us perfection
consists in fighting against them (emphasis added.)
How can we fight against them unless we face them?
Our victory does not consist in not being aware of them, but in not
consenting to them. . . . Fortunately
for us, in this war we are always victorious provided that we are willing to
fight" (Devout
Life, I, chp. 5 On Purifying
the Soul, 48-49)
Now that's a view of perfection or holiness I think we all can readily identify with. He says in effect that we are always winners as long as we are willing to fight. ("we are always victorious provided that we are willing to fight.").
De Sales had to
deal with a number of persons who were too eager to become perfect and had
unrealistic ideas about holiness and perfection. He gives advice to one young woman who was down on herself
because of her spiritual failures. This
is what he wrote to her:
For
I am sure you will note that those interior troubles you have suffered have been
caused by a great multitude of considerations and desires produced by an intense
eagerness to attain some imaginary perfection.
I mean that your imagination had formed for you an ideal of absolute
perfection, to which your will wished to lift itself; but frightened by this
great difficulty -- or rather impossibility -- it remained in dangerous
travail.
Essentially, he
tells her to relax and not be so uptight about becoming perfect and consoles her
with these words, "We [have to put up with] our imperfection[s] in order to
have perfection" (Cited in Thy
Will Be Done, pp. 169 & 170)
God
Comes Through the 'Wound'
St. Francis de
Sales envisions striving after perfection as a struggle, as a battle that
inevitably leaves us battle-scarred and wounded. This perhaps is why he was so
fond of Scuopoli's The Spiritual Combat. He carried this little book
around with him and read a page or two of it every day. As long as we are
willing to fight, to struggle; he confidently tells us we will be victorious
because, as one writer puts it, "imperfection is rather the crack in the
armor, the 'wound' that lets 'God' in" (Kurtz, The
Spirituality of Imperfection, 28). It
is "at the very point of vulnerability .
. where the surrender takes place - that is where God enters.
God comes through the
wound." (Marion Woodman, cited in Kurtz 29).
Shortly after
we liberated Iraq, you probably saw on your TV screens Shiite Moslems processing on the most Holy Day of their
religion in Nafja. They flagellated themselves with chains and other sharp
instruments to cut upon their flesh causing it to bleed.
Although we might find this behavior strange and abhorrent, it makes a
lot of sense if we see in this a physical way of trying to let God into their
lives through their physical as well as their spiritual wounds.
Sins and Spirituality
These wounds
are what religion calls our 'sins', psychologists our 'sickness'
and philosophy terms our 'errors'. De
Sales has a very comforting and consoling observation about our sins with regard
to striving for perfection. "Sin
is shameful," he says, "only when we commit it; when it has been
converted by confession and repentance it becomes honorable and salutary"
(DEVOUT LIFE, I, chp. 19, p. 71). This is reminiscent of the "O felix
culpa" ("O happy fault") of the Exultet sung at the Easter
Vigil. This same idea is expressed
with regard to our imperfections: "Hate
your imperfections," he says, "because
they are imperfections but love them because they make you see your nothingness
and emptiness and are subject to the exercise of the perfection, power and mercy
of God" (OEA, XIII, 167). So
we are to have a kind of love-hate relationship with our imperfections.
Hate them because they get in the way of our getting closer to God and to
one another, but love them because they are the wounds that lets God in.
Myth of Orestes
A similar idea
is expressed by Scott Peck in his best seller The Road Less Traveled when he interprets the myth of Orestes.
You may recall that Orestes' father, Agamemnon, was killed by Orestes'
mother, Clytemnestra, as the result of a curse that was placed on this family.
This crime brought down a curse on Orestes' head because the Greek code
of honor obliged Orestes to avenge his father by killing his murderer.
However, the greatest sin that one could commit in Greek society was
matricide. This put Orestes between a rock and a hard place.
After agonizing on what to do, he finally killed his mother.
For this unspeakable crime Orestes was tormented
night and day by the Furies, whom he alone could see.
After being haunted by the Furies for years, he could no longer stand it
and asked the gods to remove the curse. A
trial was held. Even though the god Apollo took up Orestes' defense and tried
to excuse him, Orestes, to the amazement of all, accepted complete
responsibility for his heinous crime. Because
of his honesty, the gods decided to remove the curse and sent him Eumenides,
good spirits.
Peck uses this
story to illustrate the point that "the unwanted and painful symptoms of
mental illness are manifestations of grace." (p. 290).
Grace entered into Orestes' life when he took responsibility
for his action, for his sin. This transformation is symbolized by the Furies, the
manifestations of his imperfections, being changed into Eumenides, which means
"the bearers of grace." So
in a real sense, grace and hence God came into his life through his very wounds
when he accepted responsibility for his crime. From the Christian perspective,
God comes to us when we not only accept responsibility for
our sins and imperfections but when we repent of them, honestly and
sincerely. This is
similar to what de Sales means about our sins being something salutary
and healthy for us when they are transformed by repentance.
Jesus' story of God rejoicing over one sinner who repents than over 99 that have no need of repentance is somewhat disconcerting because it appears that "God is closer to sinners than to saints." It seems that sin can bring us closer to God. The late Fr. Anthony de Mello, the Indian Jesuit, described this idea in a story that he adapted. "God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot - and thereby bringing you a little closer to him. Again and again your sins cut the string - and with each further knot, God keeps drawing you closer and closer" ( Retold by Anthony Mello, One Minute Wisdom (New York: Doubleday-Image, 1988), p. 116 as cited by Kurtz, p. 29).
A little caution is needed here.
This image can only go so far because it can imply that we are mere
puppets on a string, and it can easily give the impression that to get closer to
God we have to sin. And we all know
what St. Paul has to say about that, viz., that we do not sin so that grace can
abound in us.
To
Be Human Is To Be Imperfect
Former Baseball
Commissioner Francis Vincent related the game of baseball to life in the
following way:
Baseball
teaches us. . . how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that
failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold
in high regard those who fail less often - those who hit safely in one out of
three chances and become star players. ( as cited by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine
Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection,
p. 1)
The authors of
the book, The Spirituality of Imperfection,
paraphrase Vincent and note that this is what we learn from spirituality, from
holiness, viz., it teaches us "how to deal with failure" and to accept
the fact that error is an inescapable part of life. So in this view, saints are
people who fail less often. The
great temptation that has spelled tragedy not only for Adam and Eve, but for all
of humanity is to seek to become like God - knowing all, controlling all, and
without flaws. An authentic
spirituality, a genuine holiness "involves learning how to live with
imperfection," with our errors and accepting the fact that we are not God.
(Kurtz 18).
To be able to
live with failure is not, obviously the same thing as being a failure or being a
loser because these epithets are generally applied to people who are not
consistently striving to improve themselves and do not keep aiming at the bull's
eye, but who have rather given up on themselves.
Many of these people suffer
from a very poor self-image or an unrealistic or inflated self-image and lack
true self-understanding and self-acceptance, especially the loser. We will be
saying something a little later in this talk about self-knowledge and
self-acceptance.
Maintaining
a Balance ("Inspired Common Sense")
Awareness and
acknowledgement of our shortcomings and imperfections can help us maintain a
balance in our lives, something that is very basic to Salesian spirituality.
Elizabeth Stopp, the English Salesian Scholar, called his spirituality
"inspired common sense" because it is reasonable and balanced.
Our saint gets this idea across in an interesting image of a lute player
tuning his instrument:
As a
consummate lute player has the habit of testing the strings of his instruments
from time to time to see if they need tightening or loosening in order to render
the tone in perfect harmony, so it is necessary at least once a year to examine
and consider all affections of our souls to see if they are in tune so as to
sing the canticle of the glory of God and of our own perfection. (“Feast of
the Presentation, Sermons
of St. Francis de Sales on Our Lady, p.39)
The image of the accomplished lute player needing to adjust the strings demonstrates the wonderfully balanced spirituality that our saint championed. The occasion of an annual retreat is not only a time for prayerfully examining where we are lax by tightening the loose strings, but also where we might be too uptight by loosening the strings that are too tight, i.e., to look at those areas in our spiritual life where we might be unduly demanding of ourselves and of others. Just as a lute player has to adjust his strings and maintain a proper balance between being too loose or too tight, so do we if we want to make beautiful music by the kind of lives we lead.
Self-Awareness and Self-Acceptance
You will recall that Francis de Sales tells us that we can't fight against our imperfections unless we face them. He asks, "How can we fight against them unless we face them?" I will point out several ways which he recommends to help us confront them and to succeed in this struggle. This involves the practice of the virtues of humility, patience and gentleness that lead to self-knowledge and a high level of self-acceptance as well as prayer and knowing how to direct our intention.
The following true story helps us to appreciate the importance of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. One day one of our priests had a visit from a father and his son who had Down’s syndrome. As the father went to confession, the son waited in an adjoining room. After the father was finished, he said that his son also wanted to go to confession. The priest not knowing exactly how to evaluate the level of understanding of the boy began by asking him some questions. “What has God done for you?”, the priest asked him. And the boy answered by giving the names of his family members and of the family pets. Then the priest asked him, “And what have you done for God,” The boy answered, “I be me.”
This response certainly shows a level of understanding, of self-acceptance and of self-giving that many people unfortunately never reach in their lifetime. This supposedly retarded boy considered the members of his family and the family pets as gifts from God and clearly understood that the most precious and most valuable gift he could give back to God was himself. In a word, he saw the hand of God, the sacred, manifested in his relationship to the members of his family and also to God’s creation. He had true humility as Francis de Sales describes it in the Introduction to a Devout Life, viz., a virtue that flows from a truthful and grateful acknowledgment of the general and particular gifts that God has given us.
To
love our abjections is to love ourselves as we are loved, in our wholeness. It
is also to have compassion for ourselves It
is to see that the true place of transformation is not in our gifts but in our
weaknesses. It is to know ourselves
wounded yet beloved and thus to know each other most truly
It is not in our strengths that we find each other, but in our lack.
For in our need we call each other forth. 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. ( Francis de Sales: Introduction
to the Devout Life and Treatise on the
Love of God, p. 87)
This
beautifully ties together the importance of the virtue humility for loving
ourselves as God loves us and laying the foundation of loving others in their
"blessedness and brokenness" (W. Wright).
This notion of self-acceptance based on true humility would not square well with those who believe such an approach is detrimental to our self-esteem. It does, however, form the basis of Salesian spirituality and of the spirituality of communion. De Sales conceived all being as emanating from two principles - one God, which accounts for all the goodness that is in us, the other nothingness, which is the source of our imperfections and shortcomings. "Thus in every rational creature there is found perfection and imperfection, signs of the two principles from which it has come forth into existence" (The Sermons of St. Francis de Sales Given in Lent, 1622, p. 161). Even the angels have, so to speak, a bit of the devil in them. "This is universally true not only among human creatures, but also among the angels, for their perfection is not free from imperfection" (Ibid., 163). So a spirituality for the imperfect requires us to face honestly and courageously all aspects of our being. It is interesting to note how closely the thought of St. Francis de Sales parallels that of the book The Spirituality of Imperfection :
A
spirituality of imperfection suggests that spirituality's first step involves
facing self squarely, seeing one's
self as one is: mixed-up, paradoxical, incomplete, and imperfect. Flawedness is
the first fact about human beings. And paradoxically, in that imperfect
foundation, we find not despair but joy. For
it is only within the reality of our imperfection that we can find the peace and
serenity we crave. ( p. 20)
The note of joy
and optimism that is struck here resonates with the Salesian vision of
spirituality, which exudes these two characteristics despite our limitations,
shortcomings and imperfections. It
sees in them the need that we have for God to exercise his goodness, mercy and
love in us even though there is such an infinite disparity and a seemingly
unbridgeable chasm between us --
between perfection and imperfection. His joy and optimism are founded on his
tendency to emphasize our affinity with God based both on similarity (we are
made in his image and likeness) and dissimilarity:
In addition to this [affinity] based on likeness there is an unparalleled correspondence between God and man because of their reciprocal perfection. This does not mean that God can receive any perfection from man. But just as man cannot be perfected except by the divine goodness, so also divine goodness can rightly exercise its perfection outside itself nowhere so well as upon our humanity. The one has great need and capacity to receive good; the other has great abundance and great inclination to bestow it. (TREATISE, vol. 1, p. 91)
Solidarity
With Other Human Beings
An acceptance
of our imperfections which leads to the virtue of humility lays the foundation
for a spirituality of communion. As
I have mentioned, Francis de Sales was fond of saying that if we are all made in
the image and likeness of God, then we are made in the image and likeness of one
another. But it is not only this
truth that binds us to others and gives us joy and hope. A knowledge and ready acceptance of our imperfections is also a
source of joy, optimism and hope because it links us with other human beings.
"There is less to fear in the vision of self as ordinary, imperfect,
and limited - neither devil nor
angel, but both ." This
naturally leads to "an awareness of a connection with others who are also,
inevitably, imperfect and with the world, which, because it is made up of
imperfect beings does not demand perfection of us" (Kurtz, p. 232). This
connectedness is a great source of consolation and helps us to bear more
patiently and lovingly with our own imperfections and those of others. As a
German proverb says, "A
joy shared is doubled; a pain shared is halved." Well, we all share the
pain of our imperfections. In that
knowledge and in that sharing, there should be a deep sense of joy because
it should make us readily relate to others.
Despite this understanding of our connectedness with other imperfect people and an imperfect world, we still have quite a struggle with our imperfections and need a good deal of patience and gentleness, first with ourselves, in order to persevere. Francis gives this advice on how to deal with our imperfections.
We must not fret over our own imperfections. Although reason requires that we must be displeased and sorry whenever we commit a fault, we must refrain from bitter, gloomy, spiteful, and emotional displeasure. Many people are greatly at fault in this way. When overcome by anger they become angry at being angry, disturbed at being disturbed, and vexed at being vexed. (DEVOUT LIFE, p. 149)
It is
remarkable how closely this passage reflects the thinking of the authors of The
Spirituality of Imperfection::
"Rejoice
every time you discover a new imperfection" suggested the eighteenth
century Jesuit spiritual director Jean-Pierre Caussade.
If we find ourselves getting impatient, Caussade counseled, we can try to
bear our impatience patiently. If
we lose our tranquility, we can endure that loss tranquilly.
If we get angry, we ought not get angry with ourselves for getting angry.
If we are not content, we can try to be content with our discontent. . . . (p.
40)
It appears that
Fr. Caussade was very familiar with the writings of St. Francis de Sales. More
importantly, the authors quote Caussade approvingly as giving important insights
into the spirituality of imperfection in a passage that reflects Salesian ideas.
Spirituality
- The Mortar of Our Lives
This reflection
on God's gifts and our shortcomings are certainly very helpful and necessary.
However, there are times in our lives when our shortcomings and
imperfections seem to be tearing us and our world apart.
It is especially at those times that we desperately need something to
hold our lives and our world together. One
of the authors of The Spirituality of
Imperfection compares
spirituality to "the mortar in the fireplace. . . "
Just
as the mortar makes the chimney a chimney, allowing it to stand up straight and
tall, beautiful in its wholeness, 'the spiritual' is what makes us wholly human.
It holds our experiences together, shapes them into a whole, gives them
meaning, allows them - and us - to be whole.
Without the spiritual, however physically brave or healthy or strong we
may be, however mentally smart or clever or brilliant we may be, however
emotionally integrated or mature we may be, we are somehow not 'all
there'." (p. 146)
For De Sales,
what holds our life together is love. Love
is the mortar of our lives. When we
perform our actions out of love for God and for our neighbor, it acts as the
mortar that holds not only our experiences together, but our relations with God
and with others.
Grandeur
and Littleness
To conclude
this talk on self-knowledge and self-acceptance,
I would like to cite Pope John Paul II's observations that he makes in
his best seller, Crossing the Threshold of
Hope, words, which are a
source of great encouragement and hope. In
answering the question put to him by an Italian journalist with regard to what
many people in today’s world consider the Pope’s white cassock and such
titles as “The Vicar of Christ,” “His Holiness,” etc. as both irrelevant
and scandalous, the Pope responds, “Be not afraid” to be what you are
because this is what Jesus said to Peter when Peter, feeling his unworthiness,
his imperfections, said, “Depart
from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Our
Lord’s response, was, “Don’t be afraid, I will make you a fisher of
men.” As Peter was conscious of
his unworthiness, so is the Pope. In
words reminiscent of those of St. Francis de Sales, the Pope has Jesus respond
in this fashion:
“Have no Fear!”.
Do not be afraid of God’s mystery; do not be afraid of His love;
and do not be afraid of man’s weakness
or of his grandeur! Man does
not cease to be great, not even in his weakness.
Do not be afraid of being witnesses to the dignity of every human being,
from the moment of conception until death.
(p. 12)
There are no
more powerful words to give us the courage to be human and to urge us to pursue
a spirituality of communion. In the
same vein, de Sales writes to one woman seeking spiritual guidance:
Don't desire to be other than what you are, but desire to be thoroughly what you are. . . Believe me, this is the most important and the least understood point in the spiritual life. We all love what is according to our taste; few people like what is according to their duty or to God's liking. What is the use of building castles in Spain when we have to live in France? (To Mme Brulart, June 1607, AE, XIII, 291. English trans. in Letters of Spiritual Direction, 112)
So "I be me" is the greatest gift we can
give to God and to each other.