Down with Self-improvement

“God's admiration for us is infinitely greater than anything we can conjure up for Him.”  St. Francis of AssisiFor centuries St. Francis has been one of the Catholic Church’s most popular saints.  Do his words go straight to your heart?  They certainly did mine.  Maybe because this change and growth business I am in is a bit tricky.  It can leave us over-focusing on flaws or imperfections, which actually from a larger perspective are essential to our true beauty and can well be a distraction from the meaning and purpose or our lives.If your philosophy of life doesn’t include a monotheistic God, you might rewrite the words to say “love”.  For example:  “Love’s admiration for us is infinitely greater than anything we can conjure up for Love.”  But whatever word you use, I think this is a great and abiding truth.  There is something much larger than our strategic or left brained understanding and perspective. That something makes things whole.  It renders us whole.  And whole includes our flaws, so maybe our beauty actually needs our flaws?In the David Whyte poem, Faces at Braga, the poet tells us:If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand
 to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.If only we knew
 as the carver knew, how the flaws
 in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,we would smile, too
 and not need faces immobilized
 by fear and the weight of things undone.When we fight with our failing
 we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
 and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good.When we fight with our failing, when we focus on self-improvement — on how to make things or ourselves better — we miss the entrance to the shrine itself the poet says.  That means we miss the point of our lives.  We are sacred.  Our lives our sacred.  This world is sacred.What happens if we trust that our flaws are essential to our brilliance and our goodness?  I believe what happens is that we come alive, truly and wholeheartedly alive.  And, in the face of such aliveness, “...even the gods speak of God.”