Everything Belongs:
All things work together for good. —Romans 8:28
All things work together for good. —Romans 8:28
Can true humility and compassion exist
in our words and in our eyes
unless we know we too are capable of any act?—St. Francis of Assisi
unless we know we too are capable of any act?—St. Francis of Assisi
Jesus uses a number of images that illustrate the
tension between good and evil. They seem to say this world is a mixture of
different things, and unless you learn how to see deeply, you don’t know which
is which, and you don’t notice that God allows both good and bad to grow in the
same field (Matthew 13:24-30). When a student asks Jesus if he should pull out
the weeds, Jesus says to “let them both grow together until the harvest” (13:30).
Then, at the end of time, God will decide what is wheat and what is a weed. In
a certain way, he is saying it is none of our business to fully figure it out.
This is really quite risky of God—and it takes tremendous courage on our part
to trust God and ourselves here.
We are all a mixture of weeds and wheat and we
always will be. As Martin Luther put it, we are simul justus et peccator.
We are simultaneously saint and sinner. That’s the mystery of holding weeds and
wheat together in our one field of life. It takes a lot more patience,
compassion, forgiveness, and love than aiming for some illusory perfection that
is usually blind to its own faults. Acknowledging both the wheat and weeds in
us keeps us from thinking too highly of ourselves and also from dismissing
ourselves as terrible.
To avoid cynicism and negativity, you have to learn
to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality that you are—and everyone else
is, too. If you don’t, you’ll likely become a very angry person. To accept the
weeds doesn’t mean that you say, “It’s okay to be ignorant and evil.” It means
you have some real wisdom about yourself. You can see your weeds and
acknowledge when you are not compassionate or caring. You have to name the weed
as a weed. I’m not perfect; you’re not perfect; the church is not perfect;
America is not perfect.
If we must have perfection to be happy with
ourselves, we have only two choices: We can blind ourselves to our own evil
(and deny the weeds), or we can give up in discouragement (and deny the wheat).
It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things.
The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our
imperfection. This is precisely what Divine Perfection can help us do; only God
in us can love imperfect and broken things. By ourselves, we largely fail.
Learning how to love—which is our life’s project—is
quite simply learning to accept our messy reality. If you love anyone, then you
have learned to accept them despite their faults. You see a few things you’d
like to change in your partner, your children, yourself. By the Largeness of
God within you, you are able to trust that the good is deeper than the bad, and
usually well hidden. This is probably why so many of Jesus’ parables are
about hiddenness, seeking, and finding.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003)
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