There’s a stanza in a Tracy Chapman song, At This Point In My Life, that goes like this:
At this point in my life
I’ve done so many things wrong I don’t know if I can do right
If you put your trust in me I hope I won’t let you down
If you give me a chance I’ll try
I think of this song often, usually when I don’t feel like I’m doing much right. I find it to be such a poignant description of the human condition, of human relationships, and the vulnerability that comes from yearning to love well – despite our shortcomings.
This is one of the fundamental challenges in being human: our mistakes can make us doubt our ability to love. One of the hardest things to do in the world – at least, for me – is to go on loving and offering our love even when we’ve hurt people, made mistakes, and have loved imperfectly. This is especially true with our closest loved ones, who, by their very nature of being so close to us, are the ones we hurt the most.
And yet to not do so – to not offer our children, our parents, our siblings, our lovers, our neighbors, our friends our imperfect love and care – is to forget that we are not defined by our shortcomings. To not love them is to believe that our mistakes are all we are. It is to cut ourselves off from the flow of love and life and grace itself.
To not love is also to deny the people in our lives the opportunity to be loved by us – no matter how imperfectly. It is to cut them off from the web of love, from the web of our particular love, from the unique way that we express it and wrap them in it.
One of my favorite treats is going to the movies. This week I saw St. Vincent, a film about a cantankerous older man and the friendship he develops with his neighbor’s son, Oliver, whom he agrees to babysit. Vincent gambles, cheats, steals, lies, and drinks way too much. You have to look below the surface, but he also loves, and loves well, despite – or because of – his shortcomings.
The film brought to mind a line from Rachel Naomi Remen: “Over the years I have learned that ‘cleaning up one’s act’ may be far less important than consecrating one’s life.” You could easily look at Vincent and think of all the ways he needs to clean up his act. But look closer, and you see a man who has consecrated his life in the best way he’s known how. I left the theater thinking his way was enough, and a beautiful one at that.
For so many years, I searched and searched and worked and worked on myself. So much of this working was about getting to a place where I both loved myself and believed I was worthy of love from others. I was frantically trying to clean up my act. It was exhausting and very, very lonely. What my mistakes have shown me is that they may not be the most important thing. What loving – loving within my mistakes – has taught me is that it is the way – perhaps the only way – to consecrate my life.
Couples therapist Stan Tatkin says something radical and deeply healing: that the self help myth that we can’t love another until we love ourselves is completely untrue. If we believe that we can love and be loved only after achieving the mantel of loving ourselves then we do not understand what love is, or how love works.
Love is not something we have to work to build – like storing enough grain in the cache for winter – before we can snuggle up and rest by the fire. Love is not something we have to practice, like learning to play the violin, before we earn the right to perform.
More painfully, when we believe that we can receive love only after we’ve perfected it we can spend our whole lives outside the circle – waiting rather than entering into the current of love. Perhaps this is one of the fundamental myths that keeps us so, so lonely.
It is hard for the self to love itself into wholeness. It is only in the giving and receiving of love – of being in the current – that we come to love ourselves.
Love is what we belong to. It blesses everything it touches. It is by being loved that we are able to love ourselves; it is by loving others that we come to feel love in our own hearts, and it is in this circle of loving that we remember the love that we are.
My struggles with depression, anxiety and addiction have made me doubt this – that I can love or care for another, or love them well. I’ve cried many tears over the times I’ve loved imperfectly.
During these times, I often call my friend Maureen. Maureen was my children’s first teacher – I carted my children up and down the road to her magical school on a hill for over 11 years. She’s known my children – and me – for even longer. She’s been in my house just after a new babe was born. She’s been in my house when I was in pain and pregnant with another child and at my wit’s end. She’s been at my side when I’ve been at rock bottom, in the shadows of darkness and despair.
She is my wise woman friend, who holds me over the phone as I spill out the regret and sorrow – and sometimes the guilt – over all those moments when I’ve lost my way. She listens a lot, and offers a well of compassion. And she also brings me around to the other side: “Karly, remember your mix. You are not the sum of your inequities.”
So she tells me stories – stories even I’ve forgotten – about watching me with my children when they were younger or stories of how she sees me with them now. She gives me her eyes, because when mine are fogged with guilt or grief or exhaustion – which is a very easy thing to do – they don’t always see that clearly, and they forget the wholeness that contains it all.
Through her stories, I feel my guilt soften. In the same way that being loved enables us to love, being seen and forgiven enables us to see and forgive.
In truth, what she’s really offering is a blessing. In giving me her eyes, I gain a new perspective: I am not only my failures. I am also my wholeness. It was never either or. Renewed, I can hold both my mistakes and my love in my hands; I can walk forward in my wholeness. Like Vincent, I can offer my imperfect love in my imperfect vessel in my imperfect way, and it is enough. It is something that consecrates.
No, it is not easy. And it’s possible. The answer, of course, lies in each other. Like Vincent, what calls forth my courage to love is someone else’s need for my love. It is the people in my life – my children, my beloved, my family and friends – who pull out my love. Whether I think I can do it is almost inconsequential, for their desire and need to be loved powerfully calls forth my love, like a call and response. It pulls me to them and pulls out the love that can lie hidden under the doubt of my mistakes.
And that’s why we shouldn’t wait to love another until we completely love ourselves: because it’s the very act of loving that pulls us out of our habitual tendencies and conditioning and elicits something greater. It reconnects us to the deeper self that lies beneath our defenses and distractions and brings this deeper self up to the surface.
The call to love another is how we embody our wholeness, the better angels of our nature, who we most want to be in the world. It’s how we bless and are blessed.
In her song, If I Start to Cry, singer-songwriter Edie Carey says it like this:
Can you help me with this heart inside my chest?
It ain’t perfect, but you should see me use it
But it only works when I make a mess
When it looks like I’m about to lose it
My heart isn’t perfect, your heart isn’t perfect, but oh – do you see how we use them?
Who knew? It is by loving that we feel whole.
Karly
Your wonderful writing sent me to another of my favorite resources:
The goal of a knowledge arising from love is the reunification and reconstruction of broken selves and worlds. A knowledge born of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself. The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to know as the heart reaches out to love. Here, the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing we know and are known as members of one community, and our knowing becomes a way of reweaving that community’s bonds.
Our spiritual heritage does not merely claim that knowing ought to begin in love, though surely it should. But that claim is mere exhortation, another futile attempt to deflect the course of knowledge by battering it with “oughts.” Our spiritual tradition makes a deeper and more substantial claim: the origin of knowledge is love. The deepest wellspring of our desire to know is the passion to recreate the organic community in which the world was first created.
The minds we have used to divide and conquer creation were given to us for another purpose: to raise to awareness the communal nature of reality, to overcome separateness and alienation by a knowing that is loving, to reach out with intelligence to acknowledge and renew the bonds of life. The failure of modern knowledge is not primarily a failure in our ethics, in the application of what we know. Rather, it is a failure of our knowing itself to recognize and reach for its deeper source and passion, to allow love to inform the relations that our knowledge creates – with ourselves, with each other, with the whole animate and inanimate world.
This love is not a soft and sentimental virtue, not a fuzzy feeling of romance. The love of which spiritual tradition speaks is “tough love,” the connective tissue of reality – and we flee from it because we fear its claims on our lives. Curiosity and control create a knowledge that distances us from each other and the world, allowing us to use what we know as a plaything and to play the game by our own self-serving rules. But a knowledge that springs from love will implicate us in the web of life; it will wrap the knower and the known in compassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability.
How can he places where we learn to know become the places where we also learn to love? (8-9)
Palmer, Parker J. To Know As We Are Known. San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966.
Another wonderful book – The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning – by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham (New York: Bantam Books, 1992) is another powerful discussion of living well with the lack of perfection.
Tom Mitchell
Dear Tom,
I love Parker Palmer – his writing on his own struggles with depression and his search for vocation have been very healing for me, as they speak to my journey, as well – but I have not read this particular book. Thank you so much for sharing it.
Reading these words speaks to a truth in my heart that makes me drop my shoulders and sigh, as I recognize something I’ve known but have buried or forgotten: “Ah – there it is!” My whole body softens when I read his words.
And the book on spirituality and imperfection has been on my “books to read” list for a while. 🙂
I am tickled that we share so many favorite writers and teachings in common. I also enjoy hearing about the writers and words that speak to you and touch your heart.
If anyone else wants to learn more about Parker Palmer, you can do so here:
http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/
And here’s an interview he did on “the soul in depression” on the NPR show “On Being:”
http://www.onbeing.org/program/soul-depression/224
He’s also a columnist for On Being. Here’s a sample: http://www.onbeing.org/blog/lost-in-the-wilds-of-your-life/6717
Love, Karly
Hi Karly
As I read this last piece about giving our love however imperfectly, it was as if at the same time a scene that is in the new testament formed in my imagination. It was the picture of the boy with five loaves and two fishes coming forward with them and giving them to feed the crowd (despite the obvious unlikelihood of this having any impact at all!)..and with a blessing, thousands were fed with baskets left over. I don’t think being reminded of this is an accident, I think your five loaves and two fishes are going a very long way and many are being fed.
Love Pauline x
Pauline, I got chills reading your words. (Contemplative Christianity has a deep place in my heart, thank you.)
Your words brought tears to my eyes, because I can look at my mistakes and think, “Oh, mea culpa! I should’ve done differently.” In the Sufi teachings, they say that through the process of redemption – which means returning to source – the Divine transforms our mistakes so that they bear fruit. I think that’s what you’re saying here. That we can take our loaves and fishes and through a blessing can be an instrument of healing and grace. Wow.
And I am chuckling to myself because *this* is the voice of your feminine side, your intuition, your Feminine that you have longed to embody in your life – I knew she was already in you, and speaking through you, and whispering in your ear. Just beautiful.
My husband has a business client in London and travels to England once or twice a year. One of these days I’ll get the courage to join him and offer something live in the UK. I hope I can hug you in person at that time. Love, Karly
This is a beautiful article, Karly!!! Thank you so much!
Thank you Bethany. I enjoy your writing, too – I find it so healing and soothing. Love, Karly
Wow. Thank you for your words. So beautifully written. I love your blog x
Hi Priya, I’m so glad this nourished you! Love, Karly
I have not read your article yet but I wanted to respond before I read it. I have felt certain ways about this for years and while I understand what the statement “means I never really believed in my heart. I say this because I am a deep believer in oneness and the fact that we are all connected and that we all really all each other at a greater or lesser degree. There have been times where I was not in a state of loving myself and I intentionally would go and visit my nephews and give them love and hug them and hold them knowing that on some level I was hugging and holding and loving myself in a way that needed to be physical … Not in thought or theory. That is my feeling about this… I will read the article a little later when I have the time to savor it! Much love to you Karly
Hi Carllie, I think that is a beautiful story about how loving others and loving ourselves is interconnected and is just love, period. This is lovely, Carllie – and your nephews were blessed by it, too, I bet! Love, Karly
I’ve always thought the more accurate thought is that it is difficult to let others love you when you don’t love yourself. Good article.
Maggie, I always enjoy reading and hearing your thoughts, as they are so – well thoughtful! Yes, that does feel more accurate. I think it is difficult to both receive and offer love when I feel separate from love. For me, taking care of and loving another is one of the most healing ways “in,” to dissolve this illusion of separation. Hugs to you, Karly
Karly, thank you so much for your openness and sharing your story and your struggle. I felt like you were talking directly to me when I read your book. No one understands the struggle like you do. I long for that freedom. I feel like a prisoner sometimes. I was living a sugar free life and feeling amazing. I have fallen back into old habits. 1 step forward, 2 steps back. Thank you for your positivity, it helps so much.
Hi Natalie, It sounds like we are singing the same song – I’m so glad that my sharing helps you feel understood and less alone and supported on your journey. I am in your corner and am rooting for you. Love, Karly
Karly, thank you for continuing to share all that you do. The pearls of wisdom you gain along the way in your life, and the courage you muster to share them so honestly, is a great blessing. I have particularly appreciated the last several posts you’ve shared. I’ve seen this beautiful shift taking place in you, as your understanding of yourself continues to reveal new and wonderful truths about being. It is such a hopeful feeling that blooms inside of me as I read your words, because I often feel like, although we’ve not lived parallel lives, I have and continue to experience so many similar challenges within my own life and mind. The peace that comes from feeling like someone really gets you, and expresses things in such a way that really speaks to your soul, is priceless to me. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and hope you can accept my gratitude and love for you for all that you’re doing for me and so many others.
Dear Shannon,
Oh wow. Wow. Thank you for this beautiful comment. To me it speaks to the belonging and rest we find when we share the human journey and realize how similar we are, how we all have the same core longings. I feel so grateful that putting words to my experience helps your experience feel seen and heard, creates peace for you, inspires hope, and creates a connection between us. I can feel your love and gratitude and I’m soaking it in. 🙂
Your comment touched me for another reason. About a month ago, I realized that I missed writing. This year I was doing a lot of teaching, which I enjoy, but I didn’t have much time for writing. And the writing I was sharing was more teaching, “how to” oriented. Your comment reminded me of the power of stories, and how healing sharing our stories can be, and was an affirmation to spend more time doing the writing I’m so passionate about, and to keep writing.
So thank you for encouraging me to be true to my heart.
In love and gratitude, Karly