I've been re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water with my mom, and this week, I read this passage from her chapter "A Coal in the Hand":
Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of writing this, I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-one, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and...and...and.... If we lose any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away.
The way this hits me is as a call for grace--grace for ourselves, our selves, past and present.
It's so easy to glance back and blame/condemn/scold/dismiss my past selves for their foolishness. And it's amazingly difficult to love who I was in the midst of my biggest mistakes. But I think L'Engle is on to something: I cannot be whole if I cannot love myself with God's love--even as time gives me the hindsight to have a thousand if-only-I-had...'s.
I must set the tearful, timid, selfish girl that I was at five upon my lap, let her rest her head upon my shoulder.
I must wrap my arms around the lonely, self-deprecating, depressed college student and hold her tight, as she so needed.
I must hold the hands of the laboring mother and look deep in her eyes and say, "It's okay, it's not your fault. This failure doesn't make you a failure, doesn't void your motherhood and womanhood."
I must forgive myself for the things that are most difficult to let go of because all these selves are me: I am the result of them; their lessons are mine. Their thoughts and cravings and perspectives are under my care, and they flesh me out into a roundness of cold and hot and happy and sad and gut-wrenching and fist-pumping and still, slow breaths.
If I forget who I was, I truly am diminished. If I hold all of me and accept all of me and forgive all of me, I grow to fill the wholeness God intended for me.Labels: contentment, existential, feminism, gratitude, memories, motherhood, spiritual