Our Gift for These Times
by Marilyn O’Leary, Practitioner Emeritus
How can we love ourselves as a child of God, as perfect while being a human imperfection, when we allow our devices to tell us how we should be?
Especially when we listen to people no one knows, and believe they know more about us, what we want, who we are, than we do.
Our first act of empathy, for attention, should be for ourselves – for the unique expression of life that is each one of us – the ballet dancer Alexander Gudonov, my friend Mary, who is a poet and a painter, a minister who teaches about God/Life while not knowing with certainty what she affirms is true, the child in day care who begins to cry because the baby next to him cries – each of us, all of us give us empathy.
How can we judge any of it – especially ourselves – whom we are harder on than anyone.
Who we are is a gift. Our job is to unwrap and offer it. It’s up to others to accept it, but it is not our concern. Our purpose is to give.
So we give ourselves with love to do what we can do in our particular way and know that this is the change that we are, that we must be.