“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” –- Rabindranath Tagore
If I were making a visual of me, it would look like a crazy quilt made of some lovely as well as some rather ugly pieces of scrap fabric stitched together haphazardly. It travels through the world as Barbara (aka Barb, Barbie).
Now I think those who know me would say I have a giving heart with a willingness to lend a hand. I listen well –– even though I can also talk a lot. And that feels right to me. But there is this other side that I don’t like. I don’t always handle challenging situations with kindness, insight, or wisdom.
That is when my strident side emerges, and what I say comes across, at best, as direct, and, at worst, as harsh. As my father once said when I was young, “Barbie doesn’t care whose feelings she hurts.” But I do care. I just often don’t recognize how my bluntness can cut –– until it is too late.
Recently, during some interactions with a loved one, this side of me hit me in the face, likely harder than it hit the one in front of me. This is the side I want to jettison, never to see it again.
AN EXIT STRATEGY
I know I am not alone in my struggle to accept all the parts that make up who I am. I do not travel this road by myself. It is crowded, and that is sad.
Mirabai Starr’s new book Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground offers an exit strategy that I find helpful. She writes: “One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence, with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are….
“Over time, I learned to let go of my fantasy of the perfect [life] and to find beauty, meaning, and wholeness in the heart of reality. Unpredictable, ever-changing, humiliating, and humbling reality.… Eventually, I even came to love unlovable me, against all odds.”2
Can I beat those odds as well? I wonder.
THE COUNTERINTUITIVE
Richard Rohr teaches that in Franciscan spirituality it is not the “perfect” that God seeks in us. He writes, “I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy.”
Admitting our shortcomings and failures, what Rohr calls an “integration of the negative,” is a surrender of “… superiority, or even a need for superiority … [It] is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it, we are misguided ourselves and poor guides for others.”3
LOSING IT
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that I have always liked, that shows how what some may see as “unfitting” –– a mother getting angry at her children –– turns into a blessing.
The story goes like this: white families in a community pull their children out of their schools when integration is mandated by the courts. So, while their potential black friends are in class, here are all these white kids, hanging around the house, bored, getting into mischief, when one mother, at the end of her rope, screams, “Will you kids just go to school!”
Surprised, the kids stop what they were doing.
“Can we go to school?” they ask.
“Yes! Please!” shouts their exasperated mother.
And with that, the kids run out the door and head to school.
When the other white kids see this, they too want to go to school. And the other parents, not wanting to be the only hold outs, let their kids go. And all the carping about integration dies down.
Now that doesn’t mean that the community was then free of prejudice. Deep seated beliefs have deep roots that take a long time to be extracted. But the story does show how a woman being less than the ideal mother became the catalyst for change for the good.
MY PRAYER
If I understand wisdom teachers Starr and Rohr, God loves our messiness. And my task is to love the same, which is another way of saying, accept my humanity.
May I go so far as say that something I think of as a fault could be, if not a blessing, at least an acceptable part of myself that makes me the unique person I am?
If I am one of the Divine’s beloveds, as I believe each of us are, I can only answer in the affirmative.
So here I am, a patchwork of a quilt lacking any lovely design –– just a mess of pieces. But I tell you this, when taken as a whole, I am finding just how warm this quilt can be, how comfortable. How it fits my soft curves and hard angles. I am learning that I need no other quilt for this journey called life.
FOR REFLECTION: Are there parts of yourself which you would rather not own –– tendencies, behaviors, past mistakes? Are you able to step back and accept them as part of who you are? If not, what can you do to change that? Do you want to?
1 Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground (HarperOne, 2024), 30, 35.
2 Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, January 19, 2025. https://cac.org/daily-meditations/unafraid-of-our-faults/
Top image: Pixbay/Chen
Midtext image: Unsplash/Andrew Ebrahim
Side image: Pixabay/Avelino Calvar Martinez
