There's no way you can love until you forgive yourself for not being perfect, for not being the saint you thought you were going to be.
Compassion comes from a spacious place where a lot of things are put together and coexist, where we recognize, forgive and make friends with the enemy within. The passionate struggle with your own shadow becomes compassion for the struggles of our neighbor.
Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace
I think forgiving myself is probably the hardest lesson I have ever had to try to learn. On retreat this last I think I have just begun to glimpse what this could mean in practice. How to explain what God has started to show me is not easy, but maybe it does have to do with this sense that forgiving myself, just like dealing with the things for which I need forgiveness, is not actually something I can achieve for myself, by some effort of the will's muscles. It is much more like accepting the forgiveness of Christ, actually opening my own arms to accept the gift of the Cross, lifting to my lifeless lips the cup, that true and ordinary Grail that is present in every Holy Eucharist in every church through all the world, and always will be, and always has been.
3 comments:
I have recently experienced forgiveness as total gift. Don't know how I did it; only God accomplished the clearing away of ill feelings.
This is beautiful and inspiring. I am so far from receiving this gift. But it helps to know that it's there.
I keep reading and reading this in my reader... I am so moved.
Thank you Mike. How you are truly a channel of His peace and I do not say that lightly.
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