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A Deep Breath of Life, Alan Cohen, Brian Johnson, divine nature, forgive, imperfection, perfect, perspective, real world, Richard Rohr, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
At this moment we’re closing in on what looks to me personally at some moments like an entire month of wasted time. I wake up each morning and gradually a plan for the day emerges in my mind. As I ready for sleep each night, looking back on the day, I ask myself what I have accomplished and can rarely come up with anything more than a zoom call or two in which I have participated. It’s hard not to be disappointed in myself.
This morning I had the good fortune to read two things that assuaged my conscience and shifted my perspective. Speaking of life and how we live it, Brian Johnson (optimize.me) quoted Richard Rohr – one of his new heroes. Father Richard says the following: “A ‘perfect’ person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.” Great insight! My favorite line is elsewhere in the text, however, where he writes: “What a clever place for God to hide holiness.”
Alan Cohen, in his book, A Deep Breath of Life, was talking about “the real world” and our participation in it. Although he didn’t speak of perfection directly, he wrote a lovely paragraph that I saw as related. As he sees it: “The real world is a world of kindness, caring, vision, and service. All these qualities are attributes of our divine nature. As children of God, we can only be what God is, and that is everything that is good. We are born of light, and we return to the light. To live in light is to live in the real world.”
So here’s the message that has been renewed in my consciousness once again: Who we are is much more important than what we do. So regardless of how many or how few tasks are crossed off on my ever-present lists, I can be satisfied in this time-out-of-time to be living an imperfect real life!
The Sophia Center for Spirituality 