The Catholic Review for 01/05/2006 has, in Fr. Joseph Breighner's weekly Spirituality slot (see p. 31), a somewhat surprising-to-me piece entitled "Love yourself because of your flaws." I don't always read Father Joe — he can seem a bit of a lightweight — but I did let my eye course over this particular offering. I was glad I did. It turns out to be one of the profoundest things I've ever read.
"When I really love myself," Father Joe writes in this column, "I cannot hurt myself, and I cannot hurt another person. To me, the answer to world peace is unconditional love." It begins with loving oneself. But what is self-love? It most certainly is not, he says, "being vain or conceited. People who are vain or conceited have a lot of self-hatred covered over by a layer of 'I'm better than you.' "
Specifically, though, what is this thing called self-love? "Loving ourselves as we are," Father Joe writes, "is to love the person God loves at this moment in time" (the italics are mine, not Father Joe's). We all need to make a New Year's resolution, adds this good father, to "accept ourselves exactly the way we are."
Well ... at this moment in time I'm a 58-year-old man, still technically a virgin, whose deepest flaw may be that he has never really grown up sexually. Oh, my body is a standard-issue one for the post-middle-age white American male, but my mind is in many ways stuck in the realm of that of a twelve-year-old, when it comes to the things which interest me sexually. No, I don't covet pre-teen girls, or boys of any age, but I'm the kind of guy who, just for kicks, might love to bore a peephole in the wall of a female locker room (or, better still, the ladies' lavatory).
Whatever else that is, perverted or whatever, it's grossly immature. So at this moment in time, I'm basically just as stunted sexually as I was in seventh grade. The person God loves — and who ought, per Father Joe, to accept himself just the way he is — is a bit twisted, deep down inside.
A parable that Father Joe shares strikes home, accordingly:
A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water.
At the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one-and-a-half pots of water to his master’s house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it was made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it apologized to the water bearer.
“I’m ashamed of myself,” said the cracked pot. “For these past two years I have been able to deliver only half of my load to the master’s house.”
The bearer said to the pot, “Did you not notice as we walked along that there were flowers only on your side of the path, not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my master’s table. Without you being just the way you are, he would not have this beauty to grace his house.’”
I suppose what is being spoken of here is redemption: taking what is cracked and making the very imperfection of it a source of beauty and grace. Father Joe: "Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But if we will allow it, the Lord with use our flaws to grace his master’s table."
What is being spoken of here is, I imagine, redemption. Or as Father Joe puts it, "Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But if we will allow it, the Lord with use our flaws to grace his master’s table." Turning our most distressing flaws to some higher purpose is, I would say, the essence of redemption.
I have to admit it, though: I don't really get it. Or, rather, I see this as the meaning of redemption vaguely, with one eye half-opened. Extending the analogy, the other eye remains wholly blind to it.
For the most part, I think of the "cracked pot" aspects of who I am as things which would absolutely keep God from loving me. I criticize myself for having them, and I condemn and reject myself for ever being characterized by them, but Father Joe says, "Criticizing ourselves, condemning ourselves, rejecting ourselves only guarantees a future of self-defeating behavior."
Instead, Father Joe says I ought (as should we all) to engage regularly in a meditation which begins this way: "I treat myself as if I am someone who is deeply loved. All kinds of events come and go; yet, through it all, my love for myself is constant ... ". This kind of stuff sounds like exactly what my acupuncturist, Sherry, would tell me.
She is one of the many folks in our world today who is spiritual (albeit in a down-to-earth way) without being religious. She profoundly believes in living in the present and not being slave to either the recriminating past or the fear-filled future. What Father Joe, a Catholic, says in this column about loving the person God loves at this moment could have been a mantra from a course at the institute of New Age (actually, ancient) wisdom which credentialed Sherry as a therapist.
So it would seem that New Age can meet Old Catholic (sorry, Father Joe, for the "old") at the intersection of Self-Love and Living Life in the Present Moment!
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