We are all worthy
On humility and forgiveness.
I’ve been thinking about humility lately. Forgiveness, too.
Wondering if understanding these two things might be the key to freedom, peace, becoming our most creative selves.
A friend posted a meme. It read, “You don't have to forgive someone who hurt you.”
It’s true, you don’t. But I’m not convinced that forgiveness is about the people who hurt us.
Richard Rohr calls humility the “awareness of our own humanity”. We are imperfect beings. What does it mean to embrace this? To forgive ourselves of all the ways we don’t “measure up” to society’s arbitrary standards? To our own self-imposed standards? Does embracing our imperfectness free up our self-compassion? Our compassion towards others?
My partner is a public defender. If I’ve learned one thing from the work he does it’s that people are complicated. No one is all good or all bad. We’re a mix of things - everyone of us - a concoction of our life experiences, personalities, past.
Elizabeth Lesser, who cofounded Omega Institute, expands this idea. She had a first career as a home birth midwife. I was listening to her talk about what it was like to deliver babies - the biggest lesson she learned from that was this:
Each one of us comes into this world with a unique worth. When I looked into the face of a newborn, I caught a glimpse of that worthiness, that sense of unapologetic selfhood, that unique spark.
So we’re born with a unique spark, a strong sense of self, pure potential. And life happens. We get dealt cards - some good, some bad. It’s arbitrary. AND WE ARE ALL WORTHY.
Richard Rohr:
A human life is a great mixture of goodness, beauty, cruelty, heartbreak, indifference, love, and so much more...No one is born full of hatred. No one is born full of violence. No one is born in any less glory or goodness than you or I.
No one is worse than you and you are not better than anyone.
Isn’t that freeing?
Art teaches you this. It pushes your imperfections to the surface. That’s humbling. And being humbled makes us better people.
We learn to drive through the desert to make it to the ocean. We forgive ourselves and others because it FREES US. To love. To create. To just breathe easier.
Forgiveness is freedom. Humility is creativity.
Jump + pray,
Joce
Thanks for reading! I will be doing an Art Talk Saturday morning @ 11am in Ojai. If you’re local, please come.