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God’s Love Includes Imperfection by Richard Rohr
On The Cosmic We podcast, Richard Rohr explores on how opening ourselves to the flow of God’s unconditional love allows us to pass it on:
We’ve failed to communicate the unique nature of divine love. Divine love is infinite, but the notion of infinity cannot be conceived by the human mind. We can’t help but turn back to adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, one of my favorite Catholic mystics, shares, “There is a science about which [God] knows nothing—addition!” [1] What she was trying to say was that once we dive into infinity, which is God, any notion of adding, subtracting, meriting, losing, being worthy, is all a waste of time. God’s love is infinite, a concept the human mind cannot form. The divine notion of perfection isn’t the exclusion of imperfection, but the inclusion of imperfection. That’s divine love.
Human love thinks we have to exclude imperfection to love a person. But I’m old enough to know there’s no perfect people around. They don’t exist. We’ve all learned to keep hidden our little secret or shadow self. But divine love includes imperfection, which is what makes it divine love. Without the grace of God, we cannot do that. We pay attention to the imperfection: “I saw him do that. I heard her say that.” Then we have identified our reason not to love and we can feel superior and even “damn” the other person. That’s what I mean when I say Jesus became a scapegoat because he knew that the human pattern of scapegoating always makes someone else the problem instead of ourselves. Christianity is not about changing other people—it isn’t! It’s nice if people do change, but that’s God’s work. It’s about changing ourselves, and that never stops. I’m 80 years old and I’m still trying to change myself.
In one of his letters, Paul says, “The yes is always found in Christ,” the yes to reality (see 2 Corinthians 1:20). We are living in love if we can maintain a daily yes. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize injustice and stand against it, but we don’t let our hearts become hardened and our minds become rigid in its judgments. Love is always a yes. Even though we might see little or big problems, we don’t let it stop the yes. I find in my old age that I’ve eventually had to forgive everything. Everything! Myself, my parents, the Catholic Church, the United States of America.
What Was the Most Important “Do Not” According to Jesus?
Okay…it mystifies me that we as Christians don’t seem to recognize that of all the “do nots,” the one Jesus was strongest on was “do not judge.” And obviously he didn’t mean “do not judge people for the good things they do.” He meant do not judge others for the sins they commit.
Why? Why give us rules and then say “do not judge” those breaking them?
#1 because no one is without sin or in secular terms: nobody is perfect.
#2 because the message of Jesus is that we are loved by God in our imperfect, broken, unfinished, “sinful’ humanity, and once we recognize that we are loved in spite of our selfishness and lack of love, it gives us the grace to begin growing in loving others as Jesus and God love us.
#3 because we do not know the “hand” anyone else was dealt. Only God does, so only God can judge them. And only God will know when they can accept His love enough to truly see themselves without condemnation and be freed to become more like Jesus in what ever way God is calling them to grow. (Not in whatever way we think they should be growing at any particular time.)
Short version:
1. Nobody’s perfect.
2. When we recognize our brokenness and learn that we are loved as we are, we become free to change and grow more loving.
3.Only God knows if, when, and how He is calling and freeing someone to grow.
What I Used to Believe
I used to believe that good people were perfectly good. Or at the very least, they were headed to it, gathering speed as they aged.
Now, I know a whole lot of nice dead people who never got anywhere near perfect.
Even worse, now that I’m old, I seem to be getting less good each year, or maybe just more obviously not so great.
I’m beginning to think it’s a little like the Velveteen Rabbit story. Our pretty and soft coverings wear thin from the lessons about loving that we get from bumping up against other people.
We begin to look a lot less good or at least a more spotty good, than when we had the energy to fake it,
Freedom has its price and becoming free to be real is expensive.
But when we realize that we can see the door from here, we finally get it:
Only skinny, naked, spotty, worn looking camels, clinging to nothing can make it through that narrow gate.
Ain’t that grand!
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 