Forgivng Our Ancestors Part II: A New Paradigm of Imperfect Love

For decades I have been stuck in a matrix of resentment, disappointment, rejection, and anger. A matrix of my own making.

You see, I had constructed a paradigm of forgiveness that was organized into a tightly packaged, rigid dichotomy of: good & bad, success & failure, right & wrong.

The funny thing is, as the word "matrix" suggests, I didn't know it.

It was like what 20th century Japanese contemplative D.T. Suzuki wrote in his Introduction of Buddha of Infinite Light: The Teachings of Shin Buddhism, the Japanese Way of Wisdom and Compassion:

Based on [a] fundamental error, we construct a world with words and concepts infused with our emotions. Our life, then, becomes filled with polarities, such as good and bad, like and dislike, love and hate, black and white, mine and not mine, enlightened and not enlightened, ad infinitum. Such is the world of 84,000 delusions.

But then, one evening during this past summer, while at my last 5-day silent retreat, my teacher Heather said the following sentence during one of her many Dharma talks:

Your friends and family will love you imperfectly, and you will love your friends and family imperfectly.

You know when someone says something that is so obvious and so true that it is like "WHAMMO" right between the eyes? That's what happened to me that very same night.

As D.T. Suzuki says:

We are made to acknowledge this life of fabrication when our reality is illuminated by light. This light focuses on each of the 84,000 delusions, making them transparent and powerless. Light is symbolic of wisdom in Buddhism, and this light is none other than the Buddha of Infinite Light (Amitabha).

After years of being completely frustrated with my absolute stuckness in the process of forgiving and letting go (because, you see, they go hand in hand), all of the sudden I could see with utter clarity how I had imprisoned myself in a static Paradigm of narrow perfectionism.

But I must stress, this realization was not met as a baseball bat to the head, it was more like a long, slow exhale.

Again, D.T. Suzuki:

Since the light is not harsh, cold, and distant, but soft, warm, and proximate, it is felt as a compassionate working.

Compassionate working.

I realized I had confused my feelings and judgments about my relationships for the relationship paradigm itself; without realizing it of course.

And you know how once you gain insight or discover something new, suddenly that novel object of your attention  is everywhere?

Well, it was this past summer.  Even in the most ordinary of ways like watching movies and television.

For example, when my children and I rewatched the Disney movie Maleficent with actress Angelina Jolie as the bitter and betrayed lover who takes her revenge on an innocent child whom she, overtime, comes to love as her own, I saw imperfect love.

Or when my children asked me if Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi hero of the first 3 Star Wars movies, was "a good guy or a bad guy?" as he appears to love his wife and soon to be twin babies, but is also engaging in death and destruction, the most fitting answer seemed to be: imperfect love.

And when I binge watched the entire first 10 episodes of season one of the National Geographic series Genius about the life and times of 20th Century Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein, and I had an awareness of exquisite painful as I watched the way he engaged with ideas and the world in such an enormous way that was virtually breathtaking, while at the very same time completely missing the boat in his most primary relationships that were truly dear to him, I thought, imperfect love.

And finally when I watched the 2016 film A Quiet Passion that dramatically depicted the excruciating life of 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson played by actress Cynthia Nixon I was startled by the utter obviousness of the theme of imperfect love which played out among all of the Dickinson family members and their close friends and partners.

In fact in this movie there is a very moving scene that is well into the film when, through tears, the poet incredulously asks her only sister who has been her caretaker, friend and confidant over decades of the poet's physical, emotional and psychological struggles:

How can you go on loving me?

And the sister simply replies through her own tears:

Because you are so easy to love.

I must say though, even with all of these examples that seemed to be everywhere this summer, it is still unbelievable to me that one artful sentence could unlock such a distorted, yet powerful, long-held belief system that kept me locked in captivity where forgiveness seemed all but impossible.

Whereas now, I can see a pathway through.

I can see how good vs bad, success vs failure, and right vs. wrong just don't work, and maybe never even applied to the relationship paradigm, because now I know and accept that this pathway is necessarily fluid, complex and dynamic.

Your family and friends will love you imperfectly, and you will love your family and friends imperfectly.

Several months now since my teacher Heather said these words to me--words that I've been repeating often as a sort of prayer to memorize on my heart that I wish I had been told years ago--I feel a sensation of being released (or at least a loosening of my grip) from my old paradigm of good vs. bad.

It has become a jumping off point of sorts for an entirely new paradigm of relationships and intimacy with self and other that is grounded in realistic and humanistic functional behaviors such as: empathy, compassion, patience, integrity, remorse, authenticity,  and radical acceptance.

And even though I honestly don't know what this new Path will look like, I am willing to try to walk the Way anyway.

How about you?

(Please stay tuned for the next post: Forgiving Our Ancestors Part III.)