The ultimate act

Mercy is on my list of blog topics, spawned, I believe by our Quaker minister's message sometime back. And, I can't find it to refresh my memory. However, yesterday's excerpt from Thomas Keating's  The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living reminded me of my desire to explore this topic. Here's what re-piqued my interest:

"If we did not have to forgive people, we would have no way of manifesting God's forgiveness toward us. People who injure us are doing us a great favor because they are providing us with the opportunity of passing on the mercy that we have received. By showing mercy, we increase the mercy we receive."

Embrace/pastel on paper

Not easy stuff – we should be grateful for being hurt? How radically anti-cultural is that?

I googled mercy and scrolled past too many hospitals with that name to get to the Wikipedia entry, which described mercy as compassion and practiced in most world religions, although the Latin root means payment and reward.

When our daughters were much younger, we visited Chicago and the American Girl store to have tea with their dolls. What stood out for my youngest and continues to was the homeless woman lying in an alley because she couldn't walk. Lily gave out money to several homeless people that trip, but this woman claimed her heart and mercy. She still brings her up from time to time.

I find that kind of mercy easy. I have all the compassion in the world for the misfortunate, poor, diseased and marginalized ... especially those I don't know Mercy and forgiveness are more difficult for me to mete out when it's someone in my family or a close friend. Those hurts are harder to release.

However, I have been prompted to surrender some of them thanks to a recent metaphysical retreat on opening your heart. We were asked to write a letter of forgiveness, then burn it, symbolizing our release of the injury. It wasn't hard to find an instance. I chose a time my sister said something I felt was rather unkind that I am certain she has heard from others, over and over. She struggles with celiac disease and I, with fibromyalgia. I suspect we are more alike than different. At any rate, I was angry enough to remain out of touch with her. I have forgiven the remark, knowing it was out of her own pain. I just don't know how to re-engage. I am asking Spirit to guide the way.

Having selected an incident, writing the letter, then burning it melted my smugness, preparing me for the next exercise: writing a letter asking someone else's forgiveness, then looking in the mirror at ourselves and forgiving ourselves. Peering in the mirror was hardest. As I peel back the layers of forgiveness from strangers to family to myself, I find forgiving myself the most profound and challenging.

Years ago, in my Quaker Meeting I had a leading to facilitate a worship of forgiveness. I was thinking of institutional, societal and global hurt fueled by my involvement in a neighborhood group grappling with race relations. It was a very small gathering, but meaningful for those assembled. When we ended, I realized I had been urged to this as a means of forgiving myself.

God forgives and wraps me in mercy all of the time. Why is it less possible to do the closer it gets to home (me)? Why am I hardest on myself?

I am learning to cut myself more slack the deeper I delve into relationship with Spirit, where mercy and forgiveness are a reward.

• What does mercy mean to me?
• Where do I find forgiveness in my life?
• Where do I struggle with these concepts?
• What has Spirit taught me?
• How have I learned from others?


hard to understand
what the problem
is in giving it
freely

we have
the perfect
example right
before us

without mercy
and forgiveness,
how would we
survive as imperfect
humans?

giving them
are steps toward
unconditional love,
the ultimate act

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Summer of LOVE

This has been the summer of LOVE with four weddings. The last, in LA, we regret we will not attend. The three in which we have participated were each a breath of fresh air, incorporating the uniqueness of the couple with a practical sensibility of aptly entertaining guests in simpler, more meaningful ways.

Sunday, we were in the woods for the ceremony, the rain spattering then holding off until we were all safely tucked into the big, beautiful barn before the torrential downpour. This wedding was truly about community. Neighbors actually grew wildflowers from seed that adorned the tables and ceremony arch and a core crew assembled the stunning arrangements. Favors were woven friendship bracelets reading abiding love crafted by Phillipino women working themselves out of prostitution. The bride had participated in the World Race journeying to 11 countries in 11 months as a missionary among the most marginalized people. That’s where she served the women weavers.

Like the event we attended two weeks earlier, this too was centered on a farm. The message seems to be back to the roots, making these ceremonies grounded, earthy and very inviting.

And then this young couple pushed the envelope a bit farther (than half their guests being children and another chunk beautifully multi-cultural). They asked us to watch a video that really was a sermon. They described it as the theme of the wedding, matching the abiding-love favors. Far from the quiet simplicity of my Quaker Meeting, I was reading text and listening to booming voices on a video monitor. It’s not my style and yet I was compelled to listen because I know the bride and this must be important.

The gist of the message was that God doesn’t match us with perfect partners in marriage for a very specific reason: we learn God’s unconditional love when we are forced to forgive the other’s imperfections. This WAS big news. I have learned that you don’t marry intending to change the other, but had not considered how we are moved toward pure love when challenged. Of course it’s easy to have unconditional love for your children (even if you may not like their behavior in the moment), but it’s much more of a journey to love your spouse despite their fault and deficiencies. Let alone how they have to live and love with yours.

As I mulled over the message on the drive home, forgiveness as part of that process of living into unconditional love arose. It may have been a remnant of the day before when I attended a metaphysical retreat on opening your heart via Taraka yoga. I had no idea what I was signing up for, just went because it spoke deeply to me.

The gentle facilitator suggested metaphysics is the joining of mind and spirit and took us on a journey of 13 steps, where we reflected on our most recent seven-year cycle. Thos steps included some interesting assignments. The first was a half hour of free writing about love in your life in those seven years. Used to journaling, my pen flowed freely to the point of tiring my hand. We had a break, then came back and listed 100 attributes of love. As I rendered more, others labored to get to 100. I believe regular journaling keeps me open to these activities.

In three different exercises, we were asked to look at our first, stream-of-consciousness writing and identify a place where we could forgive someone, a place we could ask for forgiveness and where we felt love had been denied. We wrote a letter granting forgiveness, then symbolically burned it. We drafted a letter seeking forgiveness, forgave ourselves looking in a mirror and were given an envelope if we intended to send it. Watching myself in the mirror was very hard, but the longer I did it, the more I softened and quit looking for the flaws and noticed the child of God peering back. I know last week’s challenge by my best friend to post 5 photos on Facebook in which I felt beautiful prepared me for this. Seemingly random, I know Spirit has been at work on me.

Once again, we were asked to return to the original entry and identify all of the people we mentioned, one attribute of that person and whether they would have seized that opportunity of denied love.

And then it was time for another list of 100, the I-am list. We were each handed a mirror and requested to spend 10 minutes gazing at ourselves, right between the eyebrows. That, was not easy; many of us groaned. The last time I spent much time looking in a mirror was during a shamanic breathwork retreat. Again, I had no idea what I had signed up for, but my young daughter had slipped her purple princess mirror in my purse as a marker of her presence with me. I did take a journey during the session and was forced to look in a mirror. I resisted, assuming I would see evil or ugliness. When I finally screwed up the courage, all I saw was myself. Nothing scary. This time, I further softened the critic in me and began to receive the eyes of unconditional love.

Putting the mirrors aside, we were asked to compare our “love is” and “I am” lists for matching words. Boy, was that interesting. We ran short of time, yet I managed to squeak in a quick sketch of a heart inside a circle surrounded by the shared words, the final step.

I have since delivered my request for forgiveness, which was met with a hug even though the recipient has not yet read its contents. And I also understand that my partnership, my marriage, is about growing into unconditional love not just for myself, but for another who is also less than perfect.

• How do I define unconditional love?

• Where do I experience it?

• Where do I give it?

• How have I been able to forgive myself?

• When do I see myself as a child of God?

all of these

lovely brides

in flowing white

committing themselves

in community

out there and upfront

to unconditional love,

the hardest kind

but the one with the

best example

it has been a

summer of love

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Naked-baby confessions

The naked plastic dolls in my studio have become a subject of curiosity. Enough so, that I am taking note. There's a petite basket full of tiny ones that my mother was ready to pitch as she downsized. I couldn't let them go to the dumpster. Then the closer to real-sized models. Two look like clones except one is smaller. They came from the local thrift shop. They were so cute and lifelike, I couldn't resist and, besides, my girls were in the baby-doll stage then. The last used to be a Baby Jesus, sans his halo. People ask what that missing chunk out of the back of is head is ... well, it's where the halo used to be, I respond.

Somewhere along the line they were all clothed. Not now and I think that may mean something ... something significant.

Mostly people marvel over them and deem it appropriate for an artist's studio amid the plush toys, Godzillas and giant princess Halloween mask. They, however, really freaked out a recent visitor from Taiwan. A quiet teen who wants to be a film  director. No horror, she said. No wonder she didn't like the  defrocked dolls.

Other baby confessions as long as we're at it: I've always liked dirty babies in diapers  ... you know the ones someone is not quite tending. No clothes, no shoes, usually a full diaper and no attention of any kind. They're on their own, playing in the mud, sticking a dirty spoon or rock in their mouths. Saturday I gave my favorite baby gift: a basket jammed with pristine onsies, soft socks and thick wash cloths – all white. Pure and simple: just like real infants.

Sitting in worship Sunday, ruminating on a wonderful poem our minister chose to read, made me think of those molded infants. The poem was Louisa Fletcher's "The Land of Beginning Again" and the minister also mentioned early, influential Quaker Margaret Fell and her conception of letting the light "convict" us, laying all open for us to see: the good, bad and ugly.

I have known that place – perhaps too well. It's a place of nothingness, no clothes, protection or screening. Something like these buff babies I seem to collect. And then the poetic line that really stung me was:

"And I wish that the one whom our blindness had done

The greatest injustice of all

Could be there at the gates

like an old friend that waits

For the comrad he's gladdest to hail."

This poem is about starting over clean, dropping our mistakes and headaches "like a shabby coat at the door." I shivered at the line about a friend waiting at the gates, thinking:

"What if it's yourself you wait to meet at the gate of forgiveness?"

I am beginning to believe those babies represent my innocence and vulnerability, My True Self and my inner children. Some of the things that have been lain bare alongside the darker parts. I've been sifting through the dirtier, messier stuff. Maybe it's time to put that aside and claim these delicious little babies.

• When have I unconsciously collected something that held deeper meaning?
• What was that meaning?
• How was I awakened to it?
• How does living into my oddness or uniqueness help me claim more of my True Self?
• How do I express my awe, wonder and gratitude to Spirit for this journey?



always
they have riveted me

nothing hiding,
no protection

the live ones
babbling and
playing on as if
it doesn't matter
they're not tended

the hard facsimiles
don't notice anyway

just beckon me
with their exposure

helping me see
mine and
appreciating it

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