THE STORY OF ME

           This is the story of me. It is a lot like the story of you. There may be some differences in detail. We may be of the opposite sex, or of differing genders. We may live in different countries, or in different parts of the same country. We may have different ethnic heritages. We may have different occupations. We may have gone to different schools. The details of the story may vary, but the story is, in many ways, the same story. This is the story of me, and it is a lot like the story of you, and it is the story of being awesome.

            Ironically, I discovered I was awesome during the Season of Lent while working on humility. Some people believe that I missed the point of humility by discovering my own awesomeness. I, on the other hand, believe that they missed the point of being awesome.

            When I claim to be awesome, I am not offering my own self-evaluation. I have not looked rationally and objectively at my life and concluded that I am awesome. In fact, the opposite is true. When I look at my life objectively and rationally, I have to conclude that I kind of suck. My life is filled with instances of me doing and saying things I did not want to do, but the words, or the deeds, just sort of got away from me. Worse than that, there are times in which I not only hurt people in spite of my best efforts not to, but there are times when I intentionally have set out to hurt people. I have misused my God-given powers of speech and wit to make another person feel less than, or to cut someone with my words. Again, this is the story of me, and I would be willing to wager that even this part of my story is a lot like your story.

            So with all that being said, how can I ever, ever claim with a straight face that I am awesome? I can make this claim because it is not me making the claim. I, through the process of learning humility, am simply agreeing with it.

            This story of Lent in 2013 actually has its origins in a November in 2011. In that month two significant things happened. The first was that I went to Confession for the first time in years. The second was that I encountered Saint Ignatius of Loyola and decided to become a saint.

            The first thing, going to Confession, may not sound like a big deal, but at the time it was huge �" and frankly still is huge to me. Even though my father’s side of the family was Roman Catholic and I went to Mass occasionally as a child, I essentially grew up as a Presbyterian. Presbyterians, like most Protestants, only have two Sacraments: Baptism and Lord’s Supper. Confession was never required, neither was it ever really encouraged. We were just told to just feel bad about being sinners, and tell God that we were sinners and that we felt bad about it, and that was enough. When I became an Old Catholic, I still did not avail myself of the Sacrament of Reconciliation because Old Catholics do not require Confession of sins before a priest for sins to be forgiven. The Sacrament is encouraged by some priests (like me) but not required. So in my whole life, I had only been to Confession two or three times.

 

           What got me to go to Confession this time was not my sins, but my anxiety. I had been experiencing panic attacks and anxiety that I had not experienced in a long time. The Good News Translation of Psalm 38 says "I confess my sins; they fill me with anxiety." The Spirit was urging me to go to Confession and I eventually did. In a marathon Confession, I spent about two hours confessing things that I had never told to anyone. I even confessed things that I knew were not my fault, or that I knew were not sins, but had troubled me for years. When I was finished, I felt clean. I felt a closeness to God I had not felt since I was a child. I learned then, that at least for me, Confession is not about forgiveness as much as it is about letting go of the baggage that weighs me down.

            While I was preparing myself to go to Confession, and as I was reviewing my sins �" what I did and why I think I did them �" I found myself reading books about Saint Ignatius. It was not a decision, it just sort of happened. All of the books began with a biography of Saint Ignatius, informing the reader that he had been a soldier in search of glory and honor (and women). He had been injured by canon fire and required surgery for his leg. The initial surgery left Saint Ignatius mildly deformed, at least in his own mind, so he underwent a series of painful procedures to fix his leg to his satisfaction. While he was convalescing from surgery, he was given a book on the lives of the saints to read. When he read about their lives, he decided that he could do what they did and could be a saint too, which would sound arrogant and comical if he did not become a saint. 

            After reading this story many times, I decided, in a spirit I felt was very much in keeping with Saint Ignatius, that if he could become a saint, then I could become a saint. Also in keeping with Saint Ignatius, my progress toward sainthood was marked by a lot of failures, and occasional successes. Nevertheless, just as with Confession, I learned an important lesson.

            What I learned from the process of trial-and-error as I journeyed down my own path toward sainthood, is that many people share a common misconception when it comes to sainthood: that misconception is that saints are perfect. Saints are not saints because they were perfect. None of them were perfect. So if you think that you can never be saint because you are not perfect, then you have all the qualification you need!

            Saint Peter, who is said to have been the head of the Twelve Apostles, and the first pope according to Roman Catholics, we not perfect before he met Jesus, was not perfect while traveling with Jesus, and was clearly not perfect as much as fourteen years after Jesus had been raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. We know this because Saint Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians the timeline of his conversion experience. He says there was at least a fourteen year period between the time of his conversion and his own ministry. And even after all that time, he chastised Saint Peter for being hypocritical because he was hanging out with Gentiles when no other Jews were around, but when Jewish Christians arrived, he shunned the Gentiles and associated only with his fellow Jews.

            Sainthood is not about perfection, it is about focus. Saints fail like anybody else. Saints still sin like anybody else. Saints make mistakes. Saints are not perfect. That is probably why we do not declare someone to be a saint until after they die. They cannot make any more mistakes �" at least, not in this world.

            So what does any of this have to do with being awesome? It is providing the context. After reading about Saint Ignatius, and after beginning a process of regular Confession (weekly when my schedule allowed; bi-monthly much of the time), and after a decision to become a saint, I embarked on working The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.

            This led me toward the first realization that led me to the fact that I am awesome. All these events that preceded the Spiritual Exercises helped to instill a very important idea within me:

I am a deeply flawed human being; and yet, God loves me anyway.

 

This then led me to the realization that:

 

I live in a world in which I am surrounded by deeply flawed human beings; and yet, God loves them anyway.

 

I then began to think that maybe, just maybe:

If I can learn to accept the flaws in others, then maybe I can learn to love them too. 

            So the first stage in my own awesomeness was coming to understand that in spite of who I am capable of being, in spite of all my flaws, in spite of how I feel about myself, God loves me and accepts me just the way I am. As far as God is concerned, I am perfect just as I am.

            As true as this is for me, it is just as true for you! God loves you. You do not have to do anything to make God love you. You do not have to bribe God into loving you. God loves you �" just as you are, flaws and all! God accepts your flaws.

            Saint Augustine says that God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. God is radically and head over heals in love with you and with me. We do not have to do anything to make that happen. That is how it already is! God loves us, and that is AWESOME!

            This is the story of me. It is a lot like the story of you. What has been said up to this point was not really the story of me, but it was the story about me. It may be like the story that is about you. Perhaps you could identify with pieces of the story about my. But this is the story of me, and it is a lot like the story of you, and it is the story of being awesome.

            The story about me begins long, long, long before there was anything to say about me. The story of me begins before there was an earth, before there was a sun, before there was a solar system, or a galaxy, or a universe. The story about me begins long ago, even before time itself existed. The story about me began long before creation began. Just like the story of you.

            Not very long ago I thought that God loved me because that was God’s job. I never felt very loved because it seemed more like an obligation than a choice. God has to love me. That’s God’s job! I was not sure why or how I came to exist, but now that I did exist, God loved me because God was obligated to do so. So for much of my life I felt like a cosmic accident that God had to love, not by choice, but by compulsion. But that is more of the story about me. It is not the story of me. It is the story about how I once felt. Feelings are not facts, and that story about me was a lie.

            The story of me is that long, long, long ago, before the creation of anything and anyone, God had the idea of me. When God had the idea of me, God fell in love with that idea. God had to make me real. God was so in love with the idea of me that God created an entire universe, the galaxy, the sun, the moon, the earth, and everything in it. God thought of me long before I existed, and God thought that I was awesome. God was so in love with me that God had to make me real.

            Yet, that somehow was not enough for God. God, who created a whole universe and space and time and all of creation just to have a context in which to love me also decide to become just like me so God could love me even more. God became a human being in Jesus Christ. God lived and died and laughed and cried and danced and watched loved ones wither and die and experienced it all just like I have and like I still do. When we love someone, we want to understand that person. We want to know everything about that person. We want to know what makes them tick. God loved me, and became like me. God knows how I tick. God knows why I do what I do and why I sometimes say what I say. And in spite of the things I do and the things I say, God loves me. But God does not just love me. God thinks I am awesome!

            That is the story of me. It is a lot like the story of you. God thinks you are awesome! So when I say that after focusing on humility during Lent and coming away from it realizing that I am awesome, I did not miss the point. I embraced a humble idea. I put down my pride and stopped fighting the idea that I am anything less than awesome. When I learned about humility, I learned to find the courage to see myself the way God has seen me all along. I do not think I am awesome, God does! I am just agreeing with Him.