Willing to Make Mistakes

Continuing with the thread of my previous entry, I'd like to acknowledge here again for myself and others that I am not perfect. I once thought I could achieve perfection and aspired to just that - attempting to please and remain in total harmony with everyone.

However, the problem with that mindset was ultimately that it did a great deal of violence to myself. Attempting to be "perfect," I wasn't able to acknowledge the truth about myself - that I am gay and that that's true whether anyone else likes it or not and whether or not the church is able to overcome its fears and acknowledge that nether Scripture nor Tradition have anything to say against loving, comitted same-sex relationships.

In any case, what I'd most like to acknowledge in this posting is that my misguided pursuit of "perfection" not only did violence to myself but also, ironically, in the end wound up helping many people in my life to realize quite clearly that I am far from perfect. Thus, as I hear from time to time about friends and family members who feel hurt by or in disagreement with some of the choices I've made over the past few years all I can say is that I feel both regret for any pain I may have caused but also assurance that I have made the right decisions.

Ironically, given my past criteria, it seems to me now that life isn't so much about pleasing everyone as it is about doing what each of us sincerely in our conscience has concluded is right to do. For that reason, I wanted to use this posting to express my regret to anyone who feels hurt by my decisions - not to apologize for them in any way but rather to acknowledge that it was my misguided pursuit of "perfection" for so many years that set up situations in which people might feel hurt once I finally started making decisions based on who I really am.

To close, I'd like to share a brief meditation from the Buddhist tradition that's been helpful to me in wrapping my mind around some of these tensions and giving myself permission finally to be who I really am - with all my flaws and imperfections but also with my gifts, abilities and basic goodness that all of us share as human beings created in the image and likeness of God.

Peace,
Padre Chuck

"WILLING TO MAKE MISTAKES"
From "Outrageousness," a talk by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche taken from works published by Shambhala Publications, the Archive of his unpublished work in the Shambhala Archives, plus other published sources.
Given to the Directors of Shambhala Training, July 1978.

"The notion of being willing to make mistakes is just the general sense that you are no longer hopeful, that you are no longer hoping to achieve complete perfection. You are confronted with all kinds of factors -- poverty, biasedness, aggression, passion, and trying to measure yourself -- and all those situations are the opposite of being willing to make mistakes. You don't want to make mistakes; therefore you want to stick with you biasedness; you want to stick with your poverty. You want to make sure that everything goes right. ...You don't want to make mistakes; you are hoping for something good. Whereas if you abandon hope, you have no idea what you are going to get in your life. Still, whatever comes is within the context of warriorship in any case."