When we were lost and could not find the way to you, you loved us more than ever.
For the past few weeks, my siblings and parents have been engaged in an ongoing conversation about our family’s past and its effects on our lives in the present. Some of our stories have been filled with laughter and love, while others are tinged with hurt and anger set aside and hidden away over the past 30 years - and, in some cases, still lingering from previous generations.
In the midst of our conversation, one of was trying to apologize for some past words and attitudes when she said, “I am not perfect. I will always be unworthy. Human beings will never be worthy of God’s Love.”
I was and am still so struck by this one simple line, because I believe that it holds the most damaging and life-altering distortion of the truth of God, as the One Divine Being whose Spirit lies at the heart of all that we call Creation: the equating of perfection with worthiness. And I believe that this distortion lies at the heart of all of our struggles - those of my own family and those of our wider culture which listens to and preaches this distortion.
How blunt can I be here? It is a lie. Worthiness has nothing at all to do with perfection, with the absence of sin, with the absence of painful memories, with the living of a perfect life, or with being nice. Really, could anything be more preposterousthan the idea that we are not worthy of our Creator’s love- that the One who created us out of pure Love could somehow find us to be unworthy of that love?
Added to this central distortion and lie is the phenomenon that we, as humans, tend to relate to others in the same way we relate to God or our image of God. And where does this leave us? With generations of individuals trying to be worthy by being perfect, by having the perfect marriage, by having the perfect family, by having the perfect image, by having the perfect past, etc. And the fear of not being worthy is so strong, that any imperfections in ourselves - or in the mirror of others - incur our wrath which is then directed at ourselves, or at others, or sometimes indiscriminately at the world.
And, in the end, we hold others to the same distorted standard of worthiness, so we demand that others earn or “be worthy” of our own love - which we hold on to and give out as a reward.
Ah, how sad.
What a grotesque distortion of the Love that is here and all around us - being given by our God constantly, deeply, and freely every moment. It is the Breath of Life that we breathe every second. If we were not worthy of love, and indeed loved fully at this very moment with all of our imperfections great and small, the Breath of Life & Love would not be here for us to breathe. And we would not exist.
A prayer from the Christian tradition says it well:
Time and time again we broke your covenant, but you did not abandon us.
Instead, you bound yourself to us even more closely, by a bond that can never be broken.
When we were lost and could not find the way to you, you loved us more than ever.
How is love trying to work within you, in the midst of your imperfections?
What do you need to let it work more deeply?
Ask for it.
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