Open The Door For Yourself

You ever have those days when all you feel and see are your own failures? I hate those days.

The mistakes leer at me, big and small, overwhelming any sense of worth or accomplishment. The tiny things, like how the house isn’t clean and we ate fast food again and all the way up from there, every failure and mistake, every omission and error.

And standing there, seeing only my failures, I see myself reflected back from them as worthless, as faulty and flawed, as guilty and unacceptable.

Rumi

There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled. There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled. You feel it, don’t you? [Source]

This is the picture that religion or culture might give us of ourselves.

This is the picture that even our family, friends, peers, lovers might give us of ourselves.
Maybe they focus on the negative, pull it out, make it look bigger than everything else.

When others see our flaws, point out our errors over everything else, we see them, too. We begin to wonder if there is anything to us but mistakes. We begin to see ourselves as nothing more than an amalgamation of those errors.

Unspoken Sermons

George MacDonald

We do not draw back for that we are unworthy, nor even for that we are hard-hearted and care not for the good. For it is his childlikeness that makes him our God and Father. The perfection of his relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils; for our childhood is born of his fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, “Thou art my refuge, because thou art my home.” [Source]

Sometimes we try to ignore the mistakes. Look away, pretend it’s nothing. Look around, find other people’s mistakes that seem worse. Or look for positives and compare: Sure, I’ve made mistakes, but I’ve also done good things.

We play a balance game.

What if, instead, we decided to accept the errors? All the mistakes. The terrible choices, the little moments of laziness, the selfishness, the uncertainty, all of it. This is here, and these things are real, and the truth is that we don’t have to find enough positive proof to balance it out and show that we are still worthy.

Practical Mysticism

Evelyn Underhill

Our vision and understanding of it are governed by all that we bring with us, and mix with it, to form an amalgam with which the mind can deal. To “purify” the senses is to release them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, “What does it mean to me?” learn to dip ourselves in the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by comprehension, but from within by self-mergence. [Source]

There’s a truth greater than our need for balance, greater than even a broadened perspective that sees both negative and positive.

That greater truth is the one that remains rock-steady, pure, in spite of the worst, in spite of wave after wave of negativity.

That greater truth is the kernel of pure white light at your center. It’s the God-particle that is the core of you. It’s the love that exists, unthreatened and undamaged, though coated with years and years of slime and sludge and mess and muck.

That pure gem of eternity is me. It’s you. It’s infinite. The rest is just temporary.

The Teachings of Silvanus

Open the door for yourself, that you may know the One who is. Knock on yourself, that the Word may open for you. For he is the Ruler of Faith and the Sharp Sword, having become all for everyone because he wishes to have mercy on everyone. [Source]

That truth exists on the worst days and years, when depression covers us, when each day is just a series of failures, when the lowest bar is still way too high.

That truth frees us from the game of trying to show our worth, fighting to win the comparison. It’s a lot of work to come up with a long-enough list of good choices to outweigh the bad. Let’s be honest; sometimes there aren’t enough.

But that doesn’t matter, does it?

The biggest positive is who we already are. From God. Of God. Who we are, by design and by nature, outweighs all of our errors, always.