One of the seldom mentioned keys to the spiritual life is acceptance. Not acceptance of others, but of ourselves. So often we focus on what we want to change, how we want to work on ourselves, lessen our character defects. Implicit in all of this is the unspoken idea that somehow God has made an error and you are deeply flawed exactly as you are.
What if there is no error? What if our flaws are foibles and not fault lines? What if we are acceptable even in the times we have difficulty accepting ourselves? It is the nature of the desert to be a hostile and forbidding place. Yet, within all that, there is a sheer beauty that emerges from the barren landscape. The same hard-won gains come from enduring the desert of the heart.
It is at least possible that hard times come upon us not as punishments but as stringent blessings. The poet Theodore Roethke, himself a depressive, tells us: 'In a dark time, the eye begins to see.' Spiritual and creative breakthroughs are the frequent fruit of time in the desert, a sudden vivid flowering as when the desert floor comes vibrantly alive after a rare and sudden rain. Droughts can be survived. Desert time can be turned to good purpose if we are willing to listen and endure.
~That awesome picture of the Sonora Desert
can be enlarged and installed as desktop wallpaper.
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